Please Do Not Tell Me What My Pets Are Thinking

Our relationship is working just fine, thank you.

Do you want to know what your pets are thinking? I mean, really know what they’re thinking? I do not think you do. I do not think this is information that’s going to help in any way.

In a funny, smart piece for The New York Times, writer Emily Anthes explores a new app called MeowTalk, which promises to use AI technology to translate your cat’s sounds into human language. This sounds a little bit — a lot bit, actually — like a scam put together by enterprising tech moguls to separate lonely people from their money, but, while she’s appropriately skeptical, Anthes notes that there’s a little more to it than that:

In a 2019 study, Stavros Ntalampiras, a computer scientist at the University of Milan, demonstrated that algorithms could automatically distinguish between the meows that cats made in three situations: when they were being brushed, while waiting for food or after being left alone in a strange environment. MeowTalk, whose founders enlisted Dr. Ntalampiras after the study appeared, expands on this research, using algorithms to identify cat vocalizations made in a variety of contexts.

The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined “intent,” such as…