Media-savvy dog has a Twitter account that tweets whenever he barks

By Steven Shehori  |  August 20, 2015 | 8:45pm
Aux Features Twitter, dog, dogs,

We’re not exactly telling tales out of school by suggesting the internet is overrun with cats and dogs. Photos, videos, memes, GIFs, inspirational posters—the list goes on, ad infinitum. But what amount of this content has actually been uploaded by our furry companions? Due to their inherent lack of opposable thumbs, exactly 0.00 percent.

Until now, that is. Because the world’s first doggie-operated Twitter page is officially a thing. Henry Conklin, a very-much-human computer science student, recently set up the aptly-titled @OliverBarkBark account. And with the initial administrative housekeeping out of the way, every tweet now posted comes courtesy of his four-legged pal Oliver.

“Oliver has always been quite vocal, and recently I decided that his thoughts and comments needed to be shared with the world,” Conklin says in a newly-posted blog. To turn this whim into reality, the tenacious techie transformed his Raspberry Pi computer into a portable bark detector. The credit card-sized device filters Oliver’s barks from other sounds, then posts them to the microblogging site using Python-Twitter.

“Currently the tweets are random strings composed of ‘bark,’ ‘ruff,’ and ‘woof,’” Conklin notes. “But 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.”

We can only hope this technology doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, lest every (remaining) guttural noise from the Kardashian clan finds its way onto social media.

 
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