How AI could revolutionize how we connect with and care for our pets
Shazam is trying to make it possible for your pet to communicate what it’s feeling in human language. It reads data from sensors, AI and other tech on pet collars to listen to and sense the pet’s environment, track its movements and vitals, and even tie in weather data to, say, warn you if you’ve left your pet in a hot car. Then it uses voice actors and personas to represent the pet. For Personifi AI CEO John McHale, it’s a fun way to better care for our pets and help them better care for us, too. Beyond that, he believes this tech could help us to connect even more deeply with our pets.
Matt Carmichael: Can we start with a quick overview of what the Shazam Band even is?
John McHale: It snaps on your dog or cat and brings them to life in fun and meaningful ways. The fun things are that the pet can converse with their owners, express their needs and feelings, and tell their owner if they forgot to feed them. They can also banter with you. It's pet science meets machine learning meets ChatGPT meets Hollywood.
Carmichael: The band uses sensors, so it’s reading the pet and its environment. But it’s also reading you, the owner, too, right?
McHale: We are what we call empathic AI. Not only is the pet better cared for, but it brings real joy and meaning to humans as well. The pet can determine your emotional state automatically just like a human can. Shazam listens to the owner's change of voice, whether they're laughing or whether their tone has turned sad. We look at the context of a statement using AI.
You could be sitting on the couch, and you've talked to your pet. If your pet determines that you're sad, it’s going to jump up on the couch, right? But now the pet is going to verbalize that it understands that you're feeling a certain way and gives you support.
Carmichael: Part of the idea for this came after your dog was bitten by a rattlesnake. Would Shazam know that had happened?
McHale: Yes, we have something called a pet lab, and we've collected thousands of data points. We have pets that come in all day long, and we run them through a two-hour set of tests to train our AI about how they move, when they jump, how they shake toys. And we’ve integrated the sounds of thousands of rattlesnake rattles into our neural networks. That’s a niche feature. But we listen for a lot of other things that are dangerous to the pet. If we're hearing traffic in the background, we've developed technology that uses different sounds to warn the pet that they're going the wrong way. Then the owner's voice will come out of the band and tell the pet to turn around and go home.
It snaps on your dog or cat and brings them to life in fun and meaningful ways. … It's pet science meets machine learning meets ChatGPT meets Hollywood.”
Carmichael: Shazam has different personalities for the pets. Can it voice disdain and sarcasm for cats?
McHale: There are personalities like that, for sure. We have 27 personas that people can select from for their pets. That'll continue to grow.
Carmichael: Can you turn off the voice, too?
McHale: You can say, “Hey, be quiet,” and adjust the verbosity. It’s all up to the user.
Carmichael: There are interesting implications with older audiences, where the pet becomes even more of a companion. What will that mean in the future?
McHale: We think about the loneliness epidemic today. It definitely brings your relationship to a whole new level.
Carmichael: Can it integrate with other technology?
McHale: Down the road, we'll be looking at integrating with a lot of other technologies. And now you can speak a fence into existence. You can be out on a hike and say, “I don't want you to get more than 100 yards from me.” And when the pet does, our turnaround sequence kicks in with voice and tones they're trained on, and it will turn around and come back.
Carmichael: What other data does this collect? I imagine pet pharma or food brands could use this to scale understanding of how people and pets interact.
McHale: You can enter in the app what things stress your pet. If you're not home, and it's encountering those things, you’ll get a text from your pet saying, “Hey, there's some loud noises over here. It sounds like thunder." You can immediately just start soothing your pet from where you are. You can't leave a kid at home that's got anxieties, right? They can't take care of themselves. So why leave your pet at home like that?
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