A Hangzhou collar tells pet owners that noises from the sofa, hallway or food bowl may soon arrive as a sentence on their phones.
Pettichat, one of Meng Xiaoyi’s products, is a device that translates animal sounds and behavior to give an idea of what a pet might be feeling using short sentences.
It’s a bold claim, but there is still little evidence. The AI system is said to achieve around 95% accuracy, according to Meng Xiaoyi, and Chinese sources have reported a 94.6% figure, but that’s for emotion detection rather than direct animal dictionary translation.
Meng Xiaoyi is pushing PettiChat into the pet AI market with a pre-order price of $118
Pre-orders for Meng Xiaoyi’s PettiChat began in China on May 15 at a price of 799 yuan ($118). More than 10,000 units have already been reserved, according to Chinese media.
The PettiChat weighs about 27.2 grams, so it is not a large collar but a standard pet accessory that collects behavior information from pets. Includes built-in microphones that record animal sounds. The system then analyzes the behavior signals and generates a phrase for the user.
According to Dexerto, Meng Xiaoyi confirmed over the weekend that PettiChat leverages the Qwen model developed by Alibaba Cloud and records the voiceprints of pets. Alibaba Group shares trade under the ticker BABA on the New York Stock Exchange 9988.Hong Kong On the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Alibaba claims that the solution will allow scientists to research the acoustic, behavioral and emotional signals of sound.
This seems to be the right time for such a solution. The pet care, wearables, and consumer AI sectors are booming. In addition, Alibaba It can capitalize on its huge domestic market. As local media point out, the country will have 126 million pets among its city population by 2025.
The point here is that most pet owners are willing to pay to gain a deeper understanding of their four-legged companions. They carefully observe their behavior watching the bowl, tail, ears, pace, stare and a very loud call at 2 am reminding them it is time to pay the rent.
Industry professionals caution against reading too much into the application output
The biggest challenge will be proving effectiveness outside a carefully controlled experimental setting. In the public record, there is no information about any independent studies or third-party tests conducted by Meng Xiaoyi for outsiders to examine. The lack of transparency regarding data, testing methods, and local environment raises serious concerns.
Since the home environment is likely to be noisy anyway, the collar will pick up the sounds of traffic, visitors, the television, other animals, playing music and running the vacuum cleaner, as well as the owner’s voice. While the system may work well in a laboratory, it can’t miss anything in a normal home situation.
Moreover, animal behavior experts warn against this Animals Don’t communicate using their pronunciation alone; They may convey different intentions depending on body posture, position of tail and ears, eye contact, walking speed, and other factors involved. For example, barking when there is someone behind the door signals one set of intentions for the dog while barking near an empty food bowl signals another set.
This is exactly where PettiChat can be a nuisance. If the application outputs public data that coincides with the owners’ private ratings, the buyer will think that he is paying for a beautiful text. Otherwise, the app will continue to work well enough for owners to overlook the lack of scientific data.
Meng Xiaoyi is too no PettiChat is sold as a voice-only game. The offering includes two-way communication, location tracking, and adaptive learning. This makes it feel more like a broader pet technology platform than a simple translation app.
The price of 799 yuan makes things more difficult. The consumer pays not only for the opportunity to locate the lost animal using the map function. They are paying the price for the idea that animals have always been easy to understand, but only a smartphone can do it for them.
