- PettiChat collar decodes dog and cat emotions in real time, bridging human-animal communication
- Hardware pre-sale begins in May, with commercial applications eyed for livestock and wildlife monitoring
A Hangzhou-based startup has launched what it calls the world’s first real-time pet AI translator, a smart collar that interprets cat and dog emotions and converts them into human-like language.
The device, named PettiChat (萌小译), uses an embedded microphone and gyroscope to capture animal sounds and movements.
It then runs the data through Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model, combining audio and motion for multimodal emotion recognition.
“This collar can distinguish more than 20 emotional states in cats and dogs,” said PettiChat founder Li Jingyuan. “We’ve collected nearly a million audio and video clips and partnered with Zhejiang Universit’s College of Animal Science to annotate emotions like ‘angry,’ ‘playful,’ and ‘happy,’ creating a dedicated pet language model.”
Li emphasized that the translation is not word-for-word. “It can’t tell you, ‘I want the third can of food on the left,’ but it can reliably detect hunger, playfulness, discomfort, or affection,” he said. The model’s context accuracy is reported at 94.6%.
From concept to product, the team built its database from scratch in under a year. “There was no existing animal corpus. We started by filming and recording pets, and gradually established our own core dataset,” Li recalled.
PettiChat is set for pre-sale in early May, with deliveries expected around June. Pricing has not been disclosed yet.
Beyond the consumer market, the company is exploring applications in livestock management—monitoring cow and sheep health and behavior—as well as wildlife conservation.
Dedicated cluster
Hangzhou has emerged as a hub for pet tech startups. The city hosts a dedicated cluster including eight local tech firms working on pet-oriented applications and products, covering AI interaction, biosensing, precision medicine, and life sciences.
The municipal agriculture bureau says the city is now home to over 2,400 pet-related enterprises with annual revenue exceeding 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion), with smart hardware and veterinary pharmaceuticals among the fastest-growing segments.
