Goats: Bleats is going to be a Google Translate-like app

The University of Milan’s Vocapra project shows how the bleat of a goat is worth a thousand words. In short, make the recording of the sounds of the animals to get information on them Health. Sheep communicate their emotions and health through their vocalizations, movements, or even silence. Vocapra’s goal is to decipher all their bellows.

A project that reflects the European Union’s strategy to sustainable agriculture targeting Welfare of the animals of milk. When adapting to climate change and other difficulties.

Once you have enough vocalizations and recorded the videos, you should create a useful tool for breeders. A way to immediately understand the health and emotional state of goats just through their bleat. In short, it would be nice to make a Google Translate-like goat bleating app. The vocalizations will serve as a classify the acoustic signals of goats and create an IT tool for the farmer in real time. In this way, invasive health operations, such as administering unnecessary drugs, can be avoided. Furthermore, the Vocapra project is useful to establish and improve the interaction between humans and goats.

We would like to create a smartphone app that resembles a Google translate for bleating goats. The project consists of two parts: first, we installed acoustic sensors and video cameras in some farms to listen for the goats’ bleating and to associate certain environmental factors and behaviors with each vocalization. In addition, the records that the breeders themselves provided to us were very useful, recording all extraordinary events that occurred, such as illnesses or other traumatic events. As a result, we have acquired a large number of recordings and to date the project has not yet been completed, so there is the possibility to further expand our repertoire. With this project, we also want to understand whether humans can understand the vocalizations of goats at different levels. That’s why we released two different questionnaires, one for breeders and one for non-experts, to understand whether millennials living with them influenced us in any way.

Stefania Celozzi, researcher at the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan