There are a lot of examples, but also I am using "complex" generously - "we go friend walk later" and things like that, the limitations seem to be 3-4 direct ideas chained together, with person+activity+time being about as complicated as things get. It's probably possible with the right curriculum to expand on that significantly, but it's really hard to get sufficient repetition on abstract things, and dog attention is highly selective and limited. If they get overexcited, they're not in word-learning mode anymore, they're just fixated on the ball, or the pigeon, or the weird smell that just happened.
Once BCI for dogs is a thing, it wouldn't shock me to have a dog eventually write simple sentences or even engage in some sort of ideogram based text communications, but you're never getting a canine Shakespeare. You could definitely get narco k9s that deliberately say things like "I smell cocaine on this guy's shoe", or "I don't smell anything bad". With that and bodycam, you'd have a record and a way of auditing k9s.
One of the potential spin-offs of this canine cognition research is the potential for a structured standard vocabulary for working dogs in various professions, with obvious benefits in police accountability, disability accommodation and assistance dogs, and so on. If all dog trainers worked from a common curriculum, then it could be standard that dogs are taught a consistent 30-40 baseline words, so if a dog escapes, it can interact with animal control officers or the public in useful ways.
The biggest thing is that they can use language at all, I think. It's wonderful, and I hope it ends up being a big boost for animal welfare in general.
There are a lot of examples, but also I am using "complex" generously - "we go friend walk later" and things like that, the limitations seem to be 3-4 direct ideas chained together, with person+activity+time being about as complicated as things get. It's probably possible with the right curriculum to expand on that significantly, but it's really hard to get sufficient repetition on abstract things, and dog attention is highly selective and limited. If they get overexcited, they're not in word-learning mode anymore, they're just fixated on the ball, or the pigeon, or the weird smell that just happened.
Once BCI for dogs is a thing, it wouldn't shock me to have a dog eventually write simple sentences or even engage in some sort of ideogram based text communications, but you're never getting a canine Shakespeare. You could definitely get narco k9s that deliberately say things like "I smell cocaine on this guy's shoe", or "I don't smell anything bad". With that and bodycam, you'd have a record and a way of auditing k9s.
One of the potential spin-offs of this canine cognition research is the potential for a structured standard vocabulary for working dogs in various professions, with obvious benefits in police accountability, disability accommodation and assistance dogs, and so on. If all dog trainers worked from a common curriculum, then it could be standard that dogs are taught a consistent 30-40 baseline words, so if a dog escapes, it can interact with animal control officers or the public in useful ways.
The biggest thing is that they can use language at all, I think. It's wonderful, and I hope it ends up being a big boost for animal welfare in general.