FluentPet

FluentPet operates within the pet technology market, providing tools designed to facilitate interspecies communication, primarily between humans and their pets, such as dogs and cats. The company was founded by Leo Trottier, a cognitive scientist who studied at the University of Toronto and was a Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego. Trottier's background in cognitive science and AI led him to first establish CleverPet, which developed a smart game console for dogs, before launching the FluentPet brand in June 2020.

The business centers on a direct-to-consumer model, selling its products exclusively through its own websites. Revenue is generated from the sale of augmentative and interspecies communication (AIC) devices. The core product is a system of customizable, recordable sound buttons and interconnecting, non-slip hexagonal tiles called HexTiles. Pet owners can record words like "outside" or "play" onto the buttons. The hexagonal layout is a key design feature, inspired by neuroscience principles of spatial organization to help animals locate and remember words more easily. The system is scalable, allowing users to purchase starter kits and expand with more buttons and tiles as their pet's vocabulary grows. Later product iterations include the "Speak Up" buttons with improved sound quality and the WiFi-enabled "FluentPet Connect" system, which integrates with a mobile app to send notifications of button presses to the owner's phone.

A significant catalyst for FluentPet's growth was the viral success of "Bunny the Talking Dog," a sheepadoodle who gained millions of social media followers for her use of the system to form multi-word phrases. This publicity drove substantial sales, with the company selling over 2 million buttons since its 2020 launch. FluentPet also fosters a large online community through its research arm, the "How.TheyCanTalk Research Initiative," a collaborative project with UC San Diego's Comparative Cognition Lab. This initiative allows the company to gather data from thousands of users worldwide, supporting ongoing scientific inquiry into animal cognition and communication. Keywords: pet communication, dog talking buttons, cat talking buttons, interspecies communication, augmentative and interspecies communication (AIC), Leo Trottier, Bunny the dog, pet tech, animal cognition, HexTile system, recordable sound buttons, CleverPet, pet enrichment, animal language, canine cognition, direct-to-consumer pet products, smart pet devices, animal-computer interaction, pet training tools, non-verbal communication aids