Petpuls, a South Korean firm, has created an Artificial Intelligence-powered collar that can decipher five emotions in dogs’ barks via voice recognition technology. The collar allows pet owners to know through an app whether their dogs are happy, sad, anxious, angry, or relaxed. The collar will notify the pet owner by sending the information to the app through Wi-Fi. It has a 90 percent accuracy rate of emotional recognition according to Seoul National University and is the first of its kind to be powered by voice recognition. Since 2017, the company has been gathering various types of barks to analyze dogs’ emotions. It now has a database of more than 10,000 samples from 50 dog breeds. Aside from monitoring the dogs’ well-being, the collar also tracks their physical activity with its built-in accelerometer which calculates the calories they burn during exercise.

Andrew Gil, the firm’s global marketing director said, “More people began to adopt dogs, but unfortunately some of them abandoned their dogs due to miscommunication.” He added that it has an important role in the pandemic as it helps owners understand their dogs better and increase their bonding. The global demand for pet care products rose to $138 billion according to the market research of Euromonitor data. The dog population around the world also grew to 489 million or about 18%.