If there was a program that collected the barks, woofs, and whines of dogs along with a human description of what it means, could you process that data to create a sort of translator for dog speak that tells you the general idea of what they want? (e.g. hungry, glad to see you)
It would probably need an indicator for dog breeds since they will sound different. And obviously dogs don’t speak the same sort of language we do, but could general emotions be translated?
Think a little bit like those apps that (human) bird watchers catalogue bird sounds that are assigned to specific bird species. Many people have a good idea of what a dog wants/needs when they hear the noises it makes, so I can imagine something similar for dog owners. They record sounds of their dogs and what they believe it means, just as bird watchers do for mating calls.
Would this work at all? Or are the sounds of dogs too varying, even accounting for dog breeds? And how does its effectiveness change for cats and other noisy pets?
The other pets part is more likely to be useful.
It’s not that cats and dogs aren’t vocal, they are. Cats in particular supposedly are vocal for us, but don’t use sound with each other hardly at all.
Dogs are vocal with each other, and us.
The problem is that the level of complexity involved in their sounds is not just low, but only tiny part of their overall communication. Body language is way more important with cats or dogs. They communicate with their entire body, of which vocalizations are maybe 5% of the total. A bark, as example, can mean a handful of things by itself, but to know what they’re saying, you have to see the entire dog.
Trying to translate dogs and cats off of vocalizations only would be like trying to translate English using only adverbs.
That being said, I would put maybe a teeny bit of hope for dog vocalizations to be reliably translated whereas cats I wouldn’t believe it possible at all