Transcript of app design meeting

Attendees:

• Ainsley
• Yi
• Rayna

Ainsley: I'd love to know what my pet was saying. Sometimes, I think my pet is saying one thing, but it is really saying something else.

Yi: Yes, I've experienced this, too.

Rayna: What if we created an app that can translate animal sounds into human language?

Ainsley: Like a translation app—you know, from English to German—but one that translates animal sounds to English?

Rayna: Perfect.

Yi: Cool. Maybe a woof sound means "Hello" and a growl sound means "go away". Something like that.

Ainsley: Would it have cow support?

Yi: What now?

Ainsley: Cows just don't get the love.

Rayna: Maybe we could start with dogs and cats and then add cows and other creatures in a later release.

Yi: Is that okay with you, Ainsley?

Ainsley: But cows are…

Yi: I did a quick check. I don't see a product that reliably translates dog sounds to human language.

Ainsley: Possibly because it is impossible.

Yi: Moving on. Most of what animals communicate is nonverbal.

Rayna: So, the app won't only need to capture audio but also to capture video.

Yi: Does the pet wear a camera?

Ainsley: Like a cow wearing a bell?

Rayna: A camera on a pet would capture the pet's sounds pretty well, but it would be really hard to see the pet from the pet's collar. The view would be terrible.

Ainsley: The view would be excellent from a bull's horns, though.

Yi: I would caution you to ignore Ainsley.

Rayna: Noted. I think the app should live on a phone. That way, the phone's owner could point the camera at any pet and record both the audio and video.

Yi: Ah, that way, if a dog was rushing towards me—any dog, not just a dog that I know—I could point the phone at it and get an instant analysis of the animal's intentions.

Ainsley: If a bull were rushing towards me, I wouldn't need an app to know its intentions. This is yet another example of bovine superiority.

Yi: I think a lot of animal communication is through pheromones. Could an app analyze pheromones?

Rayna: I don't think so. The app is reliant on a phone's I/O devices, which don't include a chemical analyzer.

Ainsley: Phones. What are they even good for?

Yi: How about respiration rate? Can a phone camera determine that?

Rayna: It can on humans. I'm not sure about furry creatures.

Yi: But then there's the biggest question. How does the app translate all that audio and video into words?

Rayna: We'll need to train a machine learning model to do that.

Ainsley: And how long will that take?

Rayna: I would guess it will take about a year to collect good labeled data. Even then, the model might not be all that accurate. It might take another year of additional usage data to really solve this problem. So I think there should also be a way of uploading data collected by the pet translator up into the cloud, where a more sophisticated model could be evaluating data from lots and lots of pets and their owners.

Yi: Are you sure? I mean, how wide is a cat's vocabulary? I would think it would be something like, I'm annoyed, I'm rebellious, you haven't fed me, or I can't sleep.

Rayna: Hmm, if it is really that narrow, then we could develop a classification model pretty quickly, but is it really that narrow?

Ainsley: I think it's much wider than four cat categories. Hey, cat categories! I think cats also say things like, I'm experiencing ennui, get away from me, I want attention, I'm deciding what to do with you, I'm this close to scratching your nose, or I hear a mouse.

Rayna: I see what you mean. Cats are pretty sophisticated thinkers.

Ainsley: And yet, not as sophisticated as…

Yi: Do not say the next word, Ainsley. Just don't.

Ainsley: I was going to say primates.

Yi: But how many primates do you encounter in, say, Hyde Park? Compared to dogs, anyway?

Rayna: We should constrain the problem to a small number of animals, maybe just one or two animals, because data is going to be hard to come by.

Ainsley: Would there be privacy issues? Would, for example, we need the dogs and cats in our input data to give consent for their sounds and likenesses to be used?

Yi: And how exactly would a cat give legal consent?

Ainsley: I don't know, Yi. I'm not a solicitor, am I?

Yi: You are barely an engineer.

Ainsley: So, is this a free app?

Yi: Yes.

Rayna: But what about a premium edition of the app? Perhaps for owners of service dogs?

Yi: I like that idea. Professional pricing for the professional dog.

Ainsley: Could be a status symbol for service dogs. Bragging rights are important for professional dogs.

Yi: i don't think that's true.

Ainsley: How will we test it? See, Yi, that's the kind of question that an engineer would ask.

Rayna: Perhaps we could dogfood it.

Yi: Sure. Lots of our employees have dogs and cats, after all. And a bunch of employees have service dogs.

Rayna: We need humans to indicate whether or not the translation was correct. The app will need an easy feedback button.

Ainsley: Do dogs all speak the same language? Does a German shepherd's growl sound the same as a toy poodle's?

Rayna: That's actually a good question, Ainsley.

Ainsley: I have others.

Rayna: I'm thinking it more be a matter of frequency rather than language. The German shepherd's voice might just be deeper than the toy poodle's. We'll have to experiment, though.

Yi: We're at time. Shall we call it a meeting?

Ainsley: Great meeting. Cappuccino?

Rayna: Sure.

Yi: Why not.