Everyone wants to know what their pet is thinking. A Chinese startup says it has the answer, and it will only cost you $150.
Hangzhou-based tech company Meng Xiaoyi recently launched preorders for an AI-powered pet translator called PettiChat. It’s a wearable device that clips around a pet’s neck and claims to interpret vocalizations, emotions, and behavioral language with an accuracy rate approaching 95%. More than 10,000 units have already been reserved, which shows how desperately people want their cats and dogs to just explain themselves already.
The device is built on Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen large-scale model technology and reportedly draws on millions of voiceprint data points collected on pet behavior and language. The marketing is sleek, the demo videos are cute—cat meows and dog barks converted into human speech inside colorful little speech bubbles—and the pitch is very compelling if you’re the type of person who has seen your pet get midnight zoomies and wondered what, exactly, is going on in there.
The 95% accuracy claim comes with no studies, no methodology, no independent testing of any kind. Meng Xiaoyi put the number out there and left it at that.
Chinese social media wasn’t buying it. Users called the device a “human intelligence test,” which is a pretty efficient way of saying the joke is on whoever pulls out their credit card. It didn’t help that Meng Xiaoyi was reportedly founded in January 2026—a four-month-old company, a 95% accuracy claim, and nothing to show for it but a pre-order page.
To be fair, the company did secure $1 million in seed funding, which suggests investors see something worth betting on. The market for pet tech is real, pet owners are an emotionally motivated consumer base, and the underlying idea—that AI could eventually decode animal communication—has legitimate scientific interest behind it. Researchers have been working on this for years.
Maybe it works. Maybe your dog really is telling you he’s hungry and you’re his favorite person and everything is fine. Or maybe you just spent $150 on a very sophisticated guess. At this point, the company hasn’t given you enough to know which.
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