dogs

Henry Conklin loves his dog and wants to share the canine's voice with the world. Modern social media and Conklin's technological know-how make that possible.

The mathematics/computer science undergraduate student at the University of Virginia regularly engages in competitive programming and decided to use these skills to make a Twitter account that his dog Oliver could 'control'.

@OliverBarkBark tweets every time Oliver barks.

Conklin describes the process by which he achieved this feat on his website:

By connecting a Rasberry Pi, a wifi dongle, and a microphone, I was able to make a system that automatically detected, filtered, and published each and every one of Oliver's deafening vocalizations.

The full process from bark to tweet takes three steps. First is recording. I have the raspberry pi listening continuously and triggering a recording once it hears a sound over a preset volume. Oliver barking is by far the loudest thing within several miles, so the volume threshold should be sufficient. However, the recordings are still triggered occasionally by unwanted junk. To guard against this, I needed to perform a second step to filter the barks from the junk.

I took a machine learning approach to filter out the barks. I built a model using the pyAudioAnalysis library and around a day's worth of barks (about 20). I then set up a bash script to run every ten minutes, classify each recorded sound, and forward the barks on to the next step.

Finally, the barks are forwarded to the twitter api (using python-twitter) and posted under the handle @OliverBarkBark (be sure to follow!). Currently the tweets are random strings composed of "bark," "ruff," and "woof." I plan to replace that with a bark-to-text translator that will likely produce similar results but be more accurate to Oliver's actual voice.

Being the cool guy that he seems, Conklin also made all the code it took to accomplish this publicly available.

He said the next step is puppy podcasting.

The force is strong with this one.

A little kid is jumping around in front of some caged dogs at a pet shop when one of the animals decides to take action.

Watch as the boy tumbles backwards to the ground as the dog leaps towards the glass.

Jedi dog FTW.

Oh my god… Chewy!

This girl was just filming herself (vertically… ugh) practicing some yoga moves when her little dog wandered into the shot.

Then BOOM, Chewy gets lauched into space before transitioning into downward dog.

Looks like he was just a little shaken up but otherwise seems to be ok.

Dogs love all things that squeak, so if you are wearing some squeaky toys, they are going to love you.

Although their owners might get a little peeved.

In this new prank, the guys from JStuStudios head into a dog park wearing squeaky shoes that make the annoying sound with every step, and the dogs inside can’t get enough of it.

The people actually didn’t seem to mind it that much, although if the video were any longer it would get a bit irritating to watch.

For their next trick: meat shoes?

Meet Miss P, the beagle who was crowned "Best in Show" Tuesday at the 2015 Westminster Dog Show in New York.

Despite being just 15-inches, "she thinks she's the biggest dog in the show," according to her handler, Will Alexander.

Miss P is the grandniece of a Uno, a beagle that also won "Best in Show" back in 2008, so apparently it runs in the family.

Her competitors included a fan-favorite sheepdog named Swagger, Matisse the Portuguese water dog, Flame the poodle, Liz the English springer spaniel and Good Time Charlie the Skye terrier.

Patty Hearst's Shih Tzu "Rocket" won the toy group and was also among the finalists.

Here is Miss P giving a very eloquent victory speech.



Also, this happened.

Last month we saw a hero dog save his master who he thought was drowning.

Now we have this man, who bashed through ice to rescue a drowning dog from a frozen river in Russia.

The video is actually from March 2014, as some Reddit users have pointed out since the video started making its way around online.

The 21-year old man who saved the dog is a mill worker named Ivan. After the rescue, the dog ran away, but Ivan ran into him again at a store where he was buying some vodka.

He then adopted the dog whom he named Rex.

This guy is in trouble with the law.

After complaints from angry neighbors, a 3-year-old dog from Croatia name Medo has been bannedfrom barking at night.

His owner will be fined about $3,160 if he is caught making a sound between 8pm and 8am, and to prevent this from happening, he is being kept in a barn.

There has been a lot outrage from people all over the world since the story was made public, and a Facebook page has been set up to show support for Medo.

The page has more than 40 thousand likes so far, and people are posting videos of their own dogs barking as well as photos demonstrating solidarity with the phrase “I Bark for Medo” (“I Ja Lajem Za Medo”)

Others are using the hashtag #FreeMedo to show support on Twitter.

Here are some of the images and videos from Facebook: