Cheil Worldwide's Chatbot Helps Dog Owners Better Communicate with Their Dogs

Cheil Worldwide and pet healthcare company Woorien launched ‘PetTalk’, a chatbot that aids communication between the dog owners and their dogs, in South Korea. PetTalk is designed with the purpose of promoting safe and harmonious community for 15 million dog owners, their dogs, and even people who don’t have dogs.

Based on the understanding that a dog's primary means of communication is body signal, but not phonetic language, PetTalk interprets dog’s body signal and gives advice on how the owner should respond. Similar to communicating on instant messenger, the user can receive advice from a pet behaviour specialist by typing a query on PetTalk.

For example, if you ask “Why do you keep yawning?” on PetTalk after seeing your dog yawn often, animated dog characters will appear on the screen to demonstrate the relevant body signal, and reply “I’m anxious and nervous right now.” Then, you would also be given advice to yawn back at your dog in order to convey a message of ‘As I see it, it is okay here’ or ‘Now take it easy.’

On PetTalk, there are more than 100 animated body signals of the dog verified by vets and animal behaviour specialists – from big movements such as raising one foot or showing their belly, to small gestures including eyes and ears movement and facial expression. Cheil and Woorien plan to extend PetTalk’s content to phonetic languages and disease signals.

PetTalk also has A.I. technology incorporated into its search function. Since the phrasing of a question on the same body signal could vary from person to person, PetTalk is designed to have higher search accuracy when people search more.

“As PetTalk is content built together with dog owners, we made it possible for the users to suggest additional languages or better expressions,” said Joon Jeong, managing director at Woorien. “Based on the fact that a dog's body signal is universal with no big geographical or environmental difference, we plan to launch PetTalk in other languages such as English and Chinese, too.”

PetTalk is available on Woorien’s pet solution app ‘Between Dog and I’ that is currently downloadable for free from Google Play and App Store in South Korea, and the company plans to launch the app in other countries in the near future.

In conjunction with PetTalk, Cheil and Woorien plan to provide quality content about pet dogs from uploading more pet education videos on the app to providing in-depth explanation on body signals introduced in PetTalk by pet behaviour therapist via YouTube channel ‘Between Dog and I TV’. 

Cheil Worldwide took charge of the whole process of making PetTalk from idea proposal to content development.