Dog Health Goes Digital With New AI Chatbot
Maybe it’s time to rethink what it means to be sick as a dog. Tuesday, Fi, one smart pet technology company, announced a new AI-powered chatbot to help owners stay on top of their dog’s health using a mix of personal information and generalized dog breed data.
The AI agent, which the company calls Fi Intelligence, is integrated directly into the Fi app. It has access to all the information collected about your dog across the entire Fi product line, including the Fi Series 3 Plus and Fi Mini dog collars, as well as information and documents uploaded by the pet owner. The service is reserved for dogs (not cats, rabbits or other pets).
If you already have a Fi smart collar, existing data will be integrated into the AI agent’s dataset to help it answer your questions.
When creating Fi Intelligence, the company identified a host of common questions dog owners have, including whether their animal friend is walking or sleeping enough, or scratching more than usual. The chatbot was created to help owners find answers to these questions quickly and easily, according to Fi.
Fi designed its agent to answer these questions using a mix of general information about a dog’s breed, personal information and biometric data collected by Fi smart pet collars.
This simulated conversation between a pet owner and the Fi Intelligence AI agent shows how the chatbot uses detailed biometric data and uploaded documents to answer questions.
Pet owners can ask the chatbot questions in simple English and get detailed answers. Fi Intelligence is equipped to answer general questions, compare your dog’s current data to previous periods, and compare your dog’s data to other dogs of the same breed.
Fi says its chatbot is different from general-purpose AI agents because it was trained on a proprietary dataset containing “the largest repository of real canine activity, sleep and behavior data in the world.”
Fi Intelligence doesn’t replace a trip to the vet — and the company emphasizes that it’s not supposed to. Rather, the agent is supposed to give owners “informed confidence” about their dog’s health and can help them “show up.” [to the vet] with specific, documented observations drawn from weeks of continuous data.
“The strongest signal from our beta release was that owners are not using this to replace their veterinarian,” said Darrell Stone, Fi’s vice president of product. “They take advantage of this to show up better prepared.”
According to Fi, the Fi Intelligence integration will provide the most comprehensive canine health profile available in the app to date. Fi Intelligence is available immediately to all Fi members.
