Other Attempts at Animal Translation

There have been a couple of other attempts at animal translation. Probably the most notable one is the 'Meowlingual' by Takara Tomy. There is also a counterpart for dogs called the 'Bowlingual'.

The Bowlingual has a slightly different setup, with a hand held LCD display and a wireless microphone which attaches to the dogs collar. The microphone records and transmits the sound of the dog barking to the hand held LCD display, which analyses the bark against a database of barks. The bark is placed into a category such as assertive, happy, and needy, and then the emotion is displayed on the screen as an image.

Google set up an April Fools joke which produced an animal translation application for Android smartphones. The video they produced shows the app working to translate what a pig and a donkey are saying. Google made the video very convincing and in the theme of their other videos.

A link to Google's project can be found here: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/