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Dogs seem to have an awful lot to say, but have you ever wondered what they're actually on about?
Soon, you might not have to, as a range of companies are working on Dr Doolittle tech that could let you chat with your favourite hound.
One South Korean company, Petpuls, began shipping an AI-powered dog collar last year that analyses their barks to measure their emotional state.
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However, that's just the beginning, as some organisations are going even further by building full human-animal translation tools.
Another firm, Zoolingua, was founded in 2018. It's been working for some time on a mobile app that can translate dog body language and sounds to English using machine learning.
The only obstacle in the way is that training an AI to understand dogs at this stage requires humans to interpret what a dog's behaviour might mean before feeding this data to the AI.
Dogs are actually much better at understanding human language than you might think.
According to one study from researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, dogs can associate objects with language and even learn a vocabulary of 100 words at about the same rate as a baby.
The researchers found that six border collies were able to pick out old and new toys by name over a week, and that they could even recall the words after two months.
Of course, any dog owner that's ever uttered the dreaded W-A-L-K word can tell you that.
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One California firm, the Earth Species Project, is even working on AI that could one day help humans decode animal communication for all species. The firm believes it could help improve animal conservation.
Although the company's founder Aza Raskin wants to build the AI to help conserve endangered species, he says that the project is meant to work with any species.
He told the Guardian: "We're species agnostic. The tools we develop… can work across all of biology, from worms to whales."
While it would be great to chat to a worm, most animal lovers will want to use these tools to chat to their nearest and dearest: their pet dogs or cats.
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