Researchers from the Diverse Intelligences community join a Purina-hosted panel discussing the science behind pet communication and the use of soundboard buttons.
The discussion gathered leading researchers from the Diverse Intelligences community to examine the growing fascination with pet “talking buttons,” devices that invite new questions about how animals understand and respond to human language.
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GIVING PETS A VOICE
A pet soundboard (also known as “talking buttons”) is a customizable device that was designed to allow domestic animals, especially dogs and cats, to interact with recorded words. Each button is programmed with a short phrase — such as “outside,” “play,” “food,” or “help.” When used consistently, some pets learn through associative learning that pressing a button brings about a specific outcome. For example, pressing “outside” may result in being taken on a walk or being let outdoors.
Over time, users have reported that some animals begin to combine buttons — creating sequences like “toy–want” or “love–you” that appear to reflect more complex intentions or emotions. But how should we interpret this behavior?
Moderated by Dr. Annie Valuska, Principal Scientist for Pet Behavior at Purina, the conversation features three researchers from the Diverse Intelligences community: Dr. Brian Hare, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University; Dr. Heidi Lyn, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of South Alabama; and Dr. Federico Rossano, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. It also includes Alexis Devine, pet tech entrepreneur, and guardian of Bunny the “talking dog,” whose viral videos helped spark global curiosity and a wave of citizen science participation.
Together, they bring scientific clarity to the excitement surrounding soundboard communication, discussing how these tools fit into a long history of animal-language research, what large-scale studies are beginning to show about dogs’ and cats’ learning patterns, and why maintaining healthy skepticism is as important as keeping an open mind.
Ultimately, the conversation is one of curiosity and humility: by giving animals new ways to potentially express themselves, we may also learn new ways of understanding intelligence, communication, and our connection to the natural world.
Key EXCERPTS
Tips for Training the Pets on the Buttons from Alexis Devine (9:01)
Alexis Devine: ...When it comes down to it, this is just associative learning. I also think people tend to overthink it. When you have a baby and you hold up an apple and show it to the baby and say the word apple enough times in conjunction with that action, they’re going to learn the word apple.
When I start teaching buttons and help other people use buttons with their non-humans, I suggest starting with three different words so that they can immediately learn to discriminate — and picking words that are highly motivating to the individual, really easy to model multiple times a day at the board, and to say yes to a lot.
So categories I recommend:
In the beginning we didn’t recommend starting with food, but it’s such an easy concept to model and reinforce rapidly at the board. You don’t have to have a dinner button — you can’t say yes to dinner twelve times a day — but you can have pieces of kibble and say yes thirty times in a row. Press that kibble or snack button, toss a piece, reinforce.
Doing that multiple times a day gives your learner the opportunity to start opting in, to get curious. They’re getting a ton of reinforcement. These three categories are very easy to expand upon after they get over the largest hurdle — which, in my opinion, is understanding that pressing a button allows them to control outcomes.
Dr. Annie Valuska: Heidi, I know that buttons are a relatively new thing, but they’re certainly not the first device to try to improve animal–human communication. Could you give us some context on how these buttons fit into the broader history of animal communication and animal intelligence? You’ve studied a wide range of animals in different settings.
Dr. Heidi Lyn: Yeah, absolutely. Most of what I do is in the field of the evolution of language specifically. There’s a whole other field focusing on communication more broadly, because language is often seen as uniquely human. Those researchers ask questions like: How did language evolve? What do animals have that may or may not differ from humans?
The idea of “talking to animals” goes back a long way — even before Dr. Doolittle! There were reports in the late 1800s of people bringing apes into their homes and trying to teach them to talk, basically from the moment apes were introduced to Western audiences. Those attempts failed over and over again.
Even scientists raised chimpanzees alongside their children, but there was minimal success in word use. Word understanding wasn’t really studied until the 1960s, when the Gardeners had a breakthrough: they realized maybe chimpanzees just can’t use their voices the same way humans do. So they started teaching a chimpanzee American Sign Language.
That was Washoe —and her success triggered an explosion of animal language studies in the late 1960s. We then had Koko the gorilla, Chantek the orangutan, and studies in dolphins, sea lions, and parrots. There was quite a bit of backlash that we’ll talk about later, but I want to focus on something interesting.
A long time ago, I actually proposed a study looking at dogs because I’d found a 1968 book about using regular language around your dog—how dogs understand more than we give them credit for.
In the late 1990s, I worked with Lou Herman’s lab in Hawaii, testing dolphins on comprehension of two artificial languages. To this day, those studies are the best examples of syntax understanding in a nonhuman. Then, during grad school at the Language Research Center, I worked with bonobos — Kanzi, Panbanisha, and others.
Their study was groundbreaking because Kanzi began using a keyboard — very similar to today’s button systems — but it was computerized. He could push keys, and they’d make sounds. What’s fascinating is that Kanzi spontaneously began using it. They were trying to train his mother, but he picked it up by watching.
So, while associative learning likely started it, he took it much further through observation. He began responding to spoken English at the level of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. They tested him and a child with sentences—even ones he’d never heard, like “Put the key in the refrigerator.” He’d look like, “That’s silly—the key doesn’t go there,” but he’d still do it correctly.
My dissertation looked at his vocabulary errors — when he pressed the wrong key. Those errors weren’t random. They revealed patterns of thought — the representational web in his mind. Kanzi, Panbanisha, and Kanzi all showed similar associations to how humans link words.
So there’s a lot of evidence that language abilities exist outside humans. Now Federico’s team is taking that idea into dogs — asking what’s different, what’s similar, and how far along the evolutionary tree language-like abilities extend. It’s very exciting.
Dr. Rossano discusses his lab's work on the largest-ever study on pet button use. (10:40)
Dr. Federico Rossano: I started skeptical — thinking maybe they can learn to associate a few things, but does it really lead to any kind of interesting insight? And then, once I started seeing some pets doing quite impressive things, I thought maybe it’s worth taking a look.
The beauty was that it wasn’t just one or two dogs but thousands — and cats as well. Over time we developed a study that now has more than 10,000 dogs and 700 cats. Participants were willing to share what was going on in their training and button pressing. Some even let us put cameras in their homes so we could film interactions and run experiments and training studies.
Among the first things we documented was that pets truly understand what some of the buttons mean. When you press outside, they go to the door. When you press play, they fetch a toy. Their response is the same as when the owner simply says the word. They respond to the buttons in the same way.
We also showed that they use buttons intentionally and tend to press certain ones more than others. Dogs, for example, press play, outside, treat more often than any others. Cats have similar buttons — funny enough, they also have no in their top five, and settle meaning calm down directed at humans, which dogs don’t have among their top buttons.
They can also combine buttons in non-random ways, which intrigues us. Maybe they’ve been trained that way — but it’s also possible they start combining things to convey more complex thoughts. That’s an exciting new challenge.
And one more thing — a paper coming out soon shows they can learn abstract concepts like help, which is particularly important because they can actually ask for assistance when they need it. We’re developing new ways of gathering data, adding tools like eye tracking, EEG, MRIs — to learn more about what these amazing pets are doing.
Dr. Brian Hare: I think what’s really exciting about the buttons is that it’s all about dogs producing communication — they’re making requests, indicating things they want, or seeking something. My research has focused more on comprehension — whether dogs understand what humans are trying to indicate or intend for them.
We look at whether dogs grasp what humans want them to understand about the world or what to do next. That’s where we found something special about dogs compared to primates or wolves: even very young dogs — right after weaning — seem prepared to comprehend human gestures and intentions.
That finding took about twenty years to establish, traveling to places like Congo and Siberia and, most recently, Australia to work with dingoes. But the punchline is that dogs’ “genius,” which likely evolved through domestication, is their ability to read human intentions and gestures.
Now, what’s fascinating about buttons is that they take things to another level. In human development, babies first comprehend gestures — around nine to twelve months. That’s when they begin to understand that others have minds with intentions. After that, they start producing communication — pointing, asking, requesting.
Production is a more complex step. So, seeing pets begin to produce communication through buttons is really interesting — it parallels this developmental leap.
What’s also exciting is that, unlike past studies with endangered apes where sample sizes were small, this citizen-science model means thousands of pet owners are participating. That gives us the statistical power we’ve never had before.
So I’d say it’s pretty fun to think about — and I’m going to be following this research closely. I can’t wait to learn how to use these buttons with my own dog, I guess.
Dr. Annie Valuska: For those who don’t use buttons, do you have any tips based on your experience for how owners can communicate better with their dogs?
Dr. Brian Hare: The first thing is to know that dogs really are trying to understand us. They work hard to pick up what we want, even though our expectations have changed dramatically over the last few decades.
Fifty years ago, my childhood dog roamed the neighborhood freely and came home at night. My current dog stays inside, gets supervised walks, and is expected not to bark at guests, not to lunge, to be friendly to strangers and other dogs. Those are huge behavioral expectations for a species that hasn’t evolved differently in thirty years.
So when we ask them to meet us halfway — to live by human social norms — the least we can do is learn how they’re communicating. Buttons might be one way to help bridge that gap.
Watch the full video for more insights, and learn about Diverse Intelligences here.
