Help, This Cat Translator Is Ruining My Life

Now that Carmichael has been home for about two weeks and has mostly acclimated to his surroundings, I decided to uproot all of that by taking him to the vet for his first check-up. In advance of this short trip (there are somehow three vets within a half-mile radius of my apartment), I made a list of questions to ask the vet, which is how I learned exactly how much of my anxiety I have been transferring into the care and keeping of my new cat. I will let you read the questions and judge me accordingly. I only ask these questions because I care.

It’s the last question about meowing that has kept me up at night. Why, you ask? Well, first and foremost, sometimes Carmichael will decide breakfast is at 4:45 am and literally wake me up with his meows to feed him. (I am solving for this with an automatic, timed feeder). But at a friend’s urging I downloaded an app this week called MeowTalk, which has a microphone feature that listens to your cat’s meows and “translates” them so you can understand what your cat is trying to tell you.

It looks like MeowTalk launched last year to plenty of fanfare and credulous coverage in mainstream news outlets. The founder of MeowTalk is a former Amazon Alexa engineer, and he says he built his cat translation app with a team of 2 part-time developers, 1 part-time data scientist, and 1 cat vocalization specialist…