Bowlingual - dog language portable translator

Last summer a toy manufacturer from Japan, Takara, announced about its intentions to establish one-way communication between dogs and their masters via a portable mobile electronic translation device called Bowlingual. The device was shown at a recent toy exhibition in Tokyo. Surprisingly, Bowlingual is quite efficient in what it was designed for...

Bowlingual resembles a Tamagochi - a small plastic egg with a screen and buttons. A microphone is connected to the egg and attached to the dog collar. Once your puppy says something, the electronic translator processes the sound through a so-called "Animal Emotion Analysis System" and defines which category the phrase belongs to. The six available categories correspond to six emotions: happiness, sadness, etc. Each of them is associated with a fixed equivalent in human language, e.g. "Get away" or "I am going to bite you" One of the equivalents is then printed on the screen along with a relevant cartoon of a dog.

Besides oral interpreting, Bowlingual can sense your dog's emotional state and translate it into numbers. The device can rate the dog's level of happiness by a five-grade system, whereas your puppy's sympathy towards another doggy is measured using a hundred-grade scale. While the owner is away, a special mode, called Bow Wow Diary, lets the device gather data about the dog's emotions, which then are used to draw a graph on the screen.

At present, Takara and INDEX Corporation are developing a Bowlingual Mail System that will send email messages to people from their beloved four-legged fur balls.

According to the manufacturer, Bowlingual will cost around US$100, but it is still unclear when the product will hit the stores. Whether the toy will be a success will also affect one of Takara's big projects - "Dolittle", which has also been designed to improve communication between people and animals.

Translation: Denis Zaviyalov

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