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, and he says the Meowtalk app analyzes cat sounds to see if it can understand the meaning behind them. MeowTalk records and labels each sound, allowing its technology (vaguely described in every puff piece about the app as “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning software,” which could mean pretty much anything) to better understand each individual cat’s “voice.” The more it’s used, MeowTalk’s pitch goes, the more accurate it can be, and its eventual goal is to develop a smart collar (?) for your cat that would instantly translate your cat’s meow, with a human voice speaking the translation to you through the collar (which sounds like an unpleasant experience for the cat???). Somehow, the app has more than 40 million cat meows recorded in its database, presumably all because of other idiot cat owners like me who are trying to understand the un-understandable by downloading this app on a whim.