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15 juli 2019 kl 20:12

Kangaroo, teenage and market whisperer. Turning a pet interpreter into a trillion dollar company

Tags: Investeringar
Summary: The power of intuitive sound based analysis, and my secret life as kangaroo whisperer. How the language of space and pets can be turned on your teenagers... and yourself.
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Do you remember the sound of two black holes merging? The scientists who discovered gravitational waves had the bright marketing idea to translate the fluctuations in the fabric of time and space itself into the corresponding airwaves, i.e., sound.

-Plouuuuph!

Actually, it wasn't just a PR stunt. Scientists routinely perform modality transformations that allow humans to utilize our extraordinary pattern recognition capabilities for deep analysis of complex phenomena -- the one thing we still do better than computers.

Most people can tell if a single note in an entire piece of music is out of tune by just listening to it, but very few, including the very best professional musicians, can read the corresponding sheet music and find the error.

The German Shepherd-Doberman mixed breed dog I adopted 4 1/2 years ago is very reminiscent of a kangaroo when lying down. She was a bit of a handful when I got her, but soon most dog owners in our area understood she's extremely reliable and gentle, despite her loud vocalizations. I became known as the kangaroo whisperer for her transformation (that actually mostly took place in their own minds; Ronja never really changed).

Well, I started calling myself that, but it never really caught on...

Anyway, I think I know what Ronja is saying even if others don't.

That got me thinking. What if you (assuming you're a dog owner) had a system that observed your dog while you put words in its mouth?

"Pet me here. Pet me now", when lying down and lifting a paw
"I want some of that. Can I have what you're having? Come on!", maybe inching just a little too close to the dinner table
"You're home! You're home! You're home! You're home! You're home!", when reacting to your coming through the front door
"I love you so much! Ahhh, that feels so good. No, scratch closer to the ear. ON the ear!"

And on and on.

Over time, the deep learning system will accumulate a pretty large database of cues from both you and the dog, making the system even better than yourself at interpreting what your dog seems to want and say

DTA
Some cues would be individual, others breed dependent, yet others universal for all dogs. All could be shared and stored in a central database for the Dog Talk App, and the individual user gets to decide which phrases are left active for his particular situation.

From cute to crucial
Not long after its launch, the system could develop from just a cute app to a pretty accurate representation of what dogs are saying and thinking (perhaps not what they actually think, but good enough for practical purposes such as petting, feeding or projecting and preventing unwanted behavior).

- I'm sorry, Ceasar Milian, you'll soon be outwhispered.

How about dogs that detect diseases like diabetes, cancer or Parkinson's? "I have a strong smell of disease X here", or DEA dogs telling you in plain language "There's a lot of cocaine here, THERE!". Why not guide dogs for the blind being a little more nuanced in their guidance? "Car to the left!", "Angry person running toward you!"...

Okay, for now it's only meant as a cute home app, powered by an ordinary smartphone or a Microsoft Kinect. But with better gadgets our pets and working dogs could be monitored and verbally interpreted in any situation we would like.

"Mom! Dad smells faintly of that perfume that lady used to have."

The next step - listening to everything
Listening to pets is all good and fine, as is eavesdropping on black holes, but how about verbalizing the sound of the stock market? Some people already transform and listen to trading information in the form of soundwaves, but what if you, e.g., could get it as an ongoing narrative for when you're out walking? You could literally hear the market talk.

A killer app could be intepreting your teenagers. Imagine that instead of getting the cold shoulder from your mopey and sulky kid, you'd get a nuanced translation of their body language:

"I'm angry and tired, and my girlfriend broke up with me. I just wish you'd hug me like when I was little but I would never admit as much"

And, more politically correct, your infant. At least it would let you live after an interpretation like the one above.

Survival tip: use headphones, not speakers!

A true meta app would be turning it on yourself, albeit a bit unnerving. Or turn it into a parlor game, where the players try to guess what the machine will say you're thinking. Or try to make it say something as close as possible to a certain sentence.

The possibilities are endless: football teams, horse racing, politicians... You name it. With big data, with endless hours of sound, video and action data on tape, the system could be trained on and for anything and everything.

Only for fun in the beginning of course, and that's good enough. But I have no doubt the open source community would start making real progress toward useful apps for trade negotiations (what's Trump/Xi really thinking), business leaders (Elon Musk...)

Trillions
So, are you a programmer? Do you have a MS Kinect and a dog? Do you feel up to the task? Need some help? Come on now and make this happen! It's a trillion dollar company just waiting to be started.

By the way, that thing with dogs and Parkinson's is pretty new. Especially since it started with a human. She noticed a greasy, musky smell on some people. And one day she found herself at a Parkinson's meeting and realized that was the smell she'd felt all those years when nobody else did.

We all know (or are) that person that can smell mildew when nobody else can. Perhaps you know one of the extremely few human Parkinson's detectors. If you do make sure they contact the relevant scientists. It's potantially a matter of life and death. 
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