all lovers the dog They dream of being able to have a conversation with their dog. Can you imagine the gossip you could share with Firulais?

That’s why in recent years videos of dogs “talking” to their owners with buttons that convey certain simple words have spread.

How true is it that dogs can communicate in this way? Here we tell you what science thinks about it.

talking dogs

Videos of “talking” dogs have gone viral for several years, not like old videos where a dog destroys something like a word or phrase (usually very simple, like “water” or “I love you”), but the phrases can seemingly connect Feelings are via buttons that emit words.

Here is an example of those types of videos:

They are great videos, and they have been used to try to show that dogs are smarter than we thought.

Only because of what they attracted the attention of science, which sought to find the trick behind these viruses.

Buttoned dog mat

Button brushes that emit words are nothing new. It has been in use for years, but it was initially a product that was marketed to communicate with children with language problems.

It was psychologist Christina Hunger who decided to train her dog to use these mats, and she was able to communicate better with her dog.

Thanks to viral videos, especially from TikTok, the sale of these buttons and keyboards has skyrocketed. So it is not uncommon First studies for their use, supported by the University of California, is sponsored by FluentPet, one of the leading brands of these tools.

In fact, the rabbit, one of the dogs best known for using these vocal mats (which we showed you a video of above), was part of the FluentPet study and became its lead ambassador.

Bunny’s videos are endorsed by the University of California and, in theory, are not tampered with. Of course, it is edited, so they can only show which parts the brand prefers.

Do they really help us communicate with our dogs?

Serious investigations into this are still ongoing, but it is very likely that we are trying to understand everything with holographic bias.

That is, we interpret the dog’s responses as if they were the reactions of a human being.

It has long been thought that dogs have their own language, but finding them to adapt to ours won’t help us understand it further.

study A recent study by the University of Eötvös Loránd (Hungary) found that dogs are able to listen carefully to the commands of their owners, but the words are mixed in their brain, and therefore they do not differentiate between similar sounds.

The study’s conclusions found that dogs are not effective at processing phonemic details in words, which is key to developing a large vocabulary.

This experience makes us assume that we are still far from thinking that we can communicate in a complex way with our dogs and that mats are just more organized ways a dog commands us.

Simply put, dogs who “talk” with the help of these button keyboards are unlikely to understand what the words coming off the carpet mean, only that pressing a particular button gets a reward.