FluentPet is a tools to tell us what our pets are thinking.
FluentPet is a system of HexTiles and recordable sound buttons designed to help you teach your dog to communicate. It is inspired by Christina Hunger’s work with her dog Stella.
FluentPet customizable talking buttons and specially designed tiles to hold and organize buttons by word category allowing pets to communicate with you.
The FluentPet System combines ideas from speech language pathology and cognitive science to design arrangements that help you and your dog (or other ‘learner’, as we call them) communicate and remember word locations.
Sound Button Design
The FluentPet System is designed to be flexible and accommodate learners big or small as well as learners new to buttons or experienced. For smaller learners (e.g. mini and toy dog breeds), the buttons require relatively little pressure to activate.
Ideogram Design
With most of the kits, it’s included with a sheet of ideogram stickers. These have been designed to let you label your buttons, making it easier for both you and your learner to remember which button is which. FluentPet’s ideograms have been designed to be visually unique and distinguishable by learners and human teachers alike. Note that since it’s not expected that most learners to be able to immediately recognize or understand an ideogram simply from its appearance, the focus has been to make them easy to tell apart from each other.
HexTiles are not only designed to securely hold sound buttons in place, they also organize buttons by word category. A common visual pattern surrounding words of the same category makes it easier for a learner to remember which button is where, and improves the probability that your learner will be able to recognize that the words belong to a common group.
The FluentPet System is designed to be flexible and accommodate learners big and small. For small learners, the buttons require relatively little pressure to activate. In the case of larger learners (and paws!), It’s recommend spreading out the buttons when they first start using sound buttons and not filling every HexTile button space. As your learner gets more comfortable and precise with their button presses, you can experiment with a more dense arrangement of sound buttons.