Patterns we can look for
Barks, yips, howls, growls, whimpers, meows, purrs, hisses and caterwauls. Quiet, mixed or unfamiliar sounds may be missed.
A LITTLE CLOSER TO THEIR WORLD
Listen beyond the bark.
Explore your pet’s sounds, with context and care.
Sound recognition. Possible meanings. Honest uncertainty.
01
Who are we listening to?
ExperimentalA sound is a starting point.
A quiet room. One pet. Ideally 5 to 10 seconds.
Up to 30 seconds · 20 MB · WAV, MP3, M4A and browser audio02
Add what you can see
Context helps explain possibilities. It is not measured by the audio model.
Your recording stays on your device.
First analysis downloads a large model, about 90 MB plus runtime files. Wi-Fi recommended. No account or payment needed.
WHAT WE CAN KNOW
A sound recogniser, with an honest boundary.
Pet Listen uses a real AudioSet sound model to look for vocalisations. It then offers cautious context-based possibilities. It cannot translate your pet’s thoughts, confirm an emotion, or diagnose illness.
Context matters
The same call can happen in different situations. Food nearby does not prove hunger; purring does not prove a cat is happy or well.
Still to be established
This product has not been validated on a representative set of pets. Cautious screening rules reduce guessing, but do not guarantee correctness.
Research and model sources
- MIT Audio Spectrogram Transformer, with the Transformers.js ONNX conversion. A sound event model, not an emotion model.
- Google AudioSet: human-labelled sound events in short clips.
- What’s in a Meow? (2020): human listeners had limited ability to identify the recorded context of cat meows.
- Towards Dog Bark Decoding (2024): research into bark classification, not a universal dog language.
Privacy and recording help
Audio is processed in your browser and is not uploaded by Pet Listen. It is held in this tab until removed or closed. The model and runtime download from Hugging Face and its delivery services, which receive ordinary network metadata such as your IP address. The model may be cached by your browser. Clearing this site’s storage and cache removes cached files.
Microphone access starts only when you press record and stops after 30 seconds, when you stop, or when this tab is hidden. Select a short WAV, MP3 or M4A if live recording is unavailable. Formats depend on your browser. A quiet recording may need to be made closer to your pet.
No account, tracking analytics, payment details or audio library are collected by this app. Hosting providers may retain standard access logs. A saved observation downloads to your device and contains your chosen context and model results, but no audio.
Use with care
This experimental tool is for observation and education. Never provoke an animal to test it or rely on it to decide whether an animal is safe to approach. If a pet has trouble breathing, collapses, appears in severe pain or seems acutely unwell, seek urgent veterinary care regardless of any result.
Errors and missed sounds are possible. Pet Listen provides no veterinary diagnosis or guarantee of accuracy. Use the “That sound seems wrong” control to flag a result in your observation; it does not send a message or improve the model automatically.