AUDIO: THE CAT TRANSLATOR
A former Amazon engineer who worked on the Alexa program has invented an app that translates cats. Javier Sanchez has developed the MeowTalk app, which supposedly translates a wide range of meowing. Sanchez says of cat-speak: “It’s not a language. They don’t share words or communicate with each other. Cats never meow at each other out in nature.” Sanchez and his team concluded through research that cats have nine basic intentions — including “I’m hungry,” “I’m happy,” “I’m in pain,” and “I’m angry, leave me alone.” Users can record their cat’s meow to decode what it means. He says the science isn’t perfect, and users can fine-tune the app and note when they believe the translation was accurate. The ultimate goal, he says, is coming up with a collar that will be able translate a meow with a vocal response.
* As any cat owner knows, every meow and purr translates into “I’m going to kill you in your sleep tonight.”
* By the way, when your cat is silent, it means “I pooped in the upstairs bathroom ’cause you’re not cleaning my litter box often enough.”
* What the world really needs if a human-to-cat translator that says, “Get your teeth out of my hand!”
* This has been another episode of “Inventions So Dumb They Were Turned Down for Shark Tank.”
CLIP: How a cat collar would work. This is everything a cat ever says.
