Dog Soundboard Buttons - the Jury's Back On Whether They Work

We’ve all watched the TikTok videos of dogs sending precise messages to their pet parents by simply tapping a button. From “outside” to “food” to “play” and a word that would get used a lot in my home – “treat”. In one instance, a Golden Retriever alerted his pet parent to a pending ailment using his soundboard buttons to spell out a message.

If you’re unfamiliar with this type of communication tool, it’s a series of paw-sized battery-operated buttons that sit on the floor with each emitting a single, owner-recorded word or phrase. Supposedly, the dog learns how to depress whichever button is specific to the message he wants to send to his pet parent. Of course, the danger in buying into this process is that we immediately assume that just because Rover hit “walk” or “outside”, this is what he wanted, right?

Well, there’s a lot more to this than one might think.

You see, a study out of the University of California is suggesting his choices aren’t at all random. Your dog isn’t tapping any old button because we’re encouraging him to interact with this new gadget we’ve just purchased. What they’ve found is that dogs really do understand the word they’re activating.

I mean, if you think about it, our pets typically respond to those common trigger words when they're spoken as we’re reaching for their leash, the treat jar, or when opening the fridge with all that tasty food inside. Yes, they hear the word, but it’s our body language that acts as stimuli, exciting him and leading him over to his dish or the door. So how's that work when the word is coming from an inert button laying flat on the floor?

Research shows your little buddy is in fact connecting the dots and choosing the word/s he wants you to hear.

The study, led by Federico Rossano, associate professor at the University of California San Diego and head of the Comparative Cognition Lab, tackles the skeptics. "Our findings are important because they show that words matter to dogs and that they respond to the words themselves, not just to associated cues."

The first phase of these experiments started with incorporating the easy, more common terms a dog might hear related to food, play, and going outside. A fourth, meaningless word “Daxing” was then created in order to confirm the dogs were not simply reacting to every word that came from the buttons. And because we all know that dogs typically tilt their heads when they recognize words, that too, was monitored.

Rossano states, “The study shows that dogs trained to use soundboards responded appropriately to words like "play" and "outside," regardless of whether the words were spoken by their owners or triggered by pressing a button. This suggests that dogs are not merely "reading" their owners' body language or presence but are indeed processing the words”.

This ongoing study into inter-species communication is part of a much larger, global research project that will involve thousands of participants and ultimately help to understand the complexities of dog cognition and communication. So, there's much more to come.

Intrigued? Soundboard buttons come in packages of four, six, eight or 10 – depending on the number of words you want to teach your pet. And you can even double-up or triple-up if you feel your dog is a smartie that’s just itching to tell you something big.

Now, the training part requires patience and a fair amount of floor space however, once mastered, these studies are saying that you and your little buddy can actually have a genuine conversation where he can send you multiple requests and you can then respond. Or not!

Just imagine if your cat joined in on all this fun!