By Stone Martindale Jan 16, 2008, 16:10 GMT
What would you do if you could translate your dog's barks? Would you be interested in hearing what your pooch is telling you, or afraid the dog would be hitting you up incessantly for Milk Bones?
Mr. Fluffy hates dirty human kisses,would prefer you respect his personal space please... © Janet Mayer / PR Photos
According to scientists who have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks, that day is soon approaching.
The Daily Mail reports that a special program analyzed more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations.
In a series of tests the team of scientists, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary led by Csaba Molnár, discovered that a computer could recognise whether a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario.
The barks were tape recorded and then digitized on a computer, which used software to study their differences.
The results appear in the journal Animal Cognition, and suggested that dogs have acoustically different barks depending on their emotional state. The article claims that the computer "correctly identified the different situations 43 per cent of the time."
Although it was not a high success rate it was far better than human recognition, the researchers said.
The computer was most accurate in identifying the "fight" and "stranger" contexts, and was least effective at matching the "play" bark.
The software correctly identified the dogs 52 per cent of the time, again much better than the human result, suggesting there are individual differences in barks even though humans are not able to recognize them.
The Animal Cognition article notes that the team will study the barks of different breeds to discover any commonalities.
Your Talkback on this Story