ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Researchers at the University of Michigan are studying how artificial intelligence technology can be used to understand a dog’s communication.

Scientists are developing tools to distinguish whether a dog’s bark shows playfulness or aggression. They also want to gather more information from the dog’s vocalizations, such as its age, breed and sex.

“By using speech processing models initially trained on human speech, our research opens a new window into how we can leverage what we built so far in speech processing to start understanding the nuances of dog barks,” said Rada Mihalcea, director of U-M’s AI laboratory.

Researchers studied vocalizations from 74 dogs in different…