I forget what I was looking for on YouTube at the time, but the other day I came across the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a LONG time.
It’s called Pettichat and it’s from a Chinese company called Meng Xiao Yi. It’s supposedly a pet-to-human AND human-to-pet translator that works with cats and dogs. It costs $150 plus shipping. No, I am not making this up. You can go online and buy this thing right now!
If you do go buy this product (which I don’t recommend), for your hard-earned $150 you get a cheap collar that’s too big for any cat but too small for most dogs, and what looks like a small camera. And of course you also need to download their app. Fun fact — the app currently has a 2.2 rating in the Google Play store.
Most of the videos on YouTube about this device are sponsored by or posted by Pettichat themselves. Of course those all show the product working perfectly. Once you find the videos they didn’t pay for, you find out it works about as well as you’d expect it to — i.e. not at all. My favorite video is Abram Eagle testing it out on his 2 cats. No matter what was going on, the app claimed the cats were insulting him. Even when they were rubbing against his leg and purring. Even when it was obvious to anyone with eyes the cat just wanted to go outside. His attempts to translate human speech to something his cats understood went even worse. I was laughing my ass off by the end — you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/aAC77xOwuQE?si=m1fqxf1L6w5AiHE1
I can see the appeal — who hasn’t wished they could know what their pet is actually thinking? God knows I’ve asked my cats that question more often than is probably healthy. But I’m also smart enough to know that neither cats’ nor dogs’ brains operate like a human’s brain, so the entire premise behind this gadget is garbage. And hopefully you do too.