Humans can communicate with dogs using soundboards, study suggests

It has become a hot-button topic among dog lovers: can humans and canines communicate with each other using a soundboard? Now researchers say they have taken the first steps towards finding out, revealing that dogs trained to use such devices respond to the pre-recorded words just as they do to spoken words.

“Here we show that actually [dogs] do pay attention to the [soundboard] words and they produce appropriate behaviours independently of environmental cues and who produces the word,” said Prof Federico Rossano, of the University of California San Diego, who led the research.

“While this study is most certainly not mind-blowing, it is a necessary first step,” he added.

The uptake of push-button soundboards has boomed in recent years, with social media awash with videos of canines such as Bunny using the equipment. But debate has swirled over whether such dogs are really responding to audio from the device, or simply reacting to cues based on their owners’ behaviour or body language.

Writing in the journal Plos One, Rossano and colleagues report how they carried out two experiments involving a total of 59 dogs, all of whom had been trained to use a soundboard.

In the first experiment, a researcher used coloured stickers to cover the buttons on a dog’s soundboard pre-recorded for the words out/outside, play/toy, and food/eat/dinner/hungry.

Another researcher, unaware of which button was which and unable to hear the words they produced, then pressed one of these buttons, and the dog’s behaviour was recorded.

Dog owners then carried out a similar experiment, but in this case they varied between pressing one of the buttons or saying the word themselves.

The results reveal that the odds of the dogs displaying play-related behaviours was about seven times greater after the play/toy button was pushed than average for the three buttons, with similar levels of appropriate behaviour for the out/outside buttons. However, they showed no greater chance of showing food-related behaviours when the corresponding button was pushed.

Crucially, the findings held regardless of whether a researcher or owner pressed the buttons, and whether their owner pressed a button or spoke the same word.

The researchers are now studying whether dogs can push the correct button for specific situations, work that they say could not only help probe the depth of the canines’ word comprehension but also shed light on whether such devices can be used for humans and dogs to communicate with each other.

Prof Clive Wynne, the director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work, described the new study as a “nothing burger”, noting that the main finding was that dogs responded to certain verbal cues.

“There is nothing remarkable about that,” he said, adding that the team only studied responses to three familiar words – and the dogs were only successful on two of them.

Wynne said the fact that the dogs had been trained to press buttons played no role in the current study, while the research did not shed new light on what dogs understood when certain words were spoken.

Dr Mélissa Berthet, of the University of Zürich, said the study laid the groundwork for future research and showed – contrary to some suggestions – that the dogs were indeed responding to the audio from the buttons rather than cues from their owner.

“They really needed to show this,” she said. “And now I think the community of scientists is waiting for the rest that’s going to be exciting.”