Can dogs really talk by pressing buttons?
Sascha Crasnow believes that Parker, her two-year-old Beagle mix, can “speak” to her by using her paw to tap buttons with prerecorded words on them.
The dog recently coined a new term for ambulance, after spotting one parked outside, by pressing the buttons “squeaker” and then “car,” she says. During a visit from Crasnow’s father, the dog asked his name by using three buttons: “what,” “word” and “human.”
They are known as “button dogs” for their perceived ability to communicate by pressing buttons identifiable by pictures, symbols or location corresponding to specific words. Pet parents record nouns, verbs and emotions, and believe the buttons enable their dogs— and in rare cases, cats— to ask questions, express such feelings as pain (“ouch”) or anger (“mad”) and indicate something they want (“treat,” “‘cookie” and “outside”).
The concept is growing in popularity. Pet owners can purchase buttons and soundboards from about $30 for a starter kit to $230 for a “They can talk” complete set. Button dog videos have become their own genre on social media. One of the hashtags used with videos of button dogs, #dogbuttons, had more than 102.8 million views on TikTok, as of Monday afternoon.
Button dogs are also the subject of debate, with animal behavior experts raising questions about what the dogs are really “saying” and whether the words mean the same thing to a dog as they do to us.
“We already understand what dogs are trying to tell us without the buttons, but when we use a human linguistic interface, we start ascribing too much to our joint understanding of these words,” said Amritha Mallikarjun, a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “If a dog hits the button ‘love,’ maybe what it means to the dog is: ‘when I hit this button, I get pets, or everyone says my name.’ “
Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere, director of the Thinking Dog Center at Hunter College, believes “our dogs have been ‘talking’ to us this whole time, but we just haven’t been ‘listening,’” she said. “The short videos I see online seem to indicate that dogs are able to form associations between a button press and an outcome, but it’s really difficult to say if anything more is happening.”
While some research has looked at the functionality of canine buttons, a large study underway at the University of California at San Diego is trying to determine whether the buttons can enable dogs to communicate meaningfully.
The research, created by Federico Rossano, the principal investigator, is being conducted in partnership with FluentPet, which produces and sells buttons and soundboards. The company is sharing data with Rossano’s lab and the University of California at San Diego, but is not funding the study, he said.
“We are not paying for the data, and they are not paying us to analyze the data,” Rossano said. “My lab collects additional data and runs behavioral experiments as well, completely independent of FluentPet.”
Human parents of an estimated 10,000 dogs from 47 countries initially registered and submitted basic data about their pets, Rossano said. A much smaller subset — fewer than a dozen now, but eventually several hundred — have cameras in their homes running 24/7 to capture the dogs’ button behavior.
There are about 1,600 dogs and 400 cats whose data is currently being submitted, he said. “But since this is a longitudinal study, depending on the questions, we can use data from the more than 10,000 participants or just focus on the data we are collecting now,” Rossano added.
“For example, if we want to look at whether some temperament traits or breed are better at learning buttons, then we can look at all 10,000 subjects,” he said. “But if we want to see how quickly participants can learn a new button/ concept or are willing to participate in an experiment, obviously the pool we can count now on is the 2,000 participants, not the 10,000.”
The scientists also plan to visit the dogs and run tests to establish if they are actually communicating or randomly pressing buttons. Results likely won’t be available before year’s end. The scientific papers outlining their evidence are either under review for publication, or in the process of being submitted.
“While there are clear individual differences among the dogs in the study, we have now compelling evidence that for several dogs in our study, the button presses are not random,” he said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have evidence that this wasn’t random.”
Clive Wynne, founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, is not surprised that many button dog parents are already convinced.
“We love our dogs, and so we are prone to putting the richest possible interpretation on the things they do,” Wynne said. He believes only a small minority of dogs can use the buttons to communicate, which he regards as “impressive,” although dogs certainly can acquire vocabulary.
He cites “Chaser,” the border collie who knew about 1,200 words but did not use buttons to communicate. She had a “receptive” vocabulary— most words were the names of toys —and would bring them back on command, Wynne said.
Wynne recently met with Rossano to learn more about the research and said he was “reassured” it will provide answers to many unresolved questions. “The fact that he is not rushing is a good thing,” Wynne said. “Also, he’s not taking their [FluentPet’s] money. He takes data, but he’s not taking their money.”