Researchers from the University of Michigan set out to discover whether scientists could get round that lack of data by piggy-backing on research carried out on humans.
So the team gathered the barks, growls and whimpers of 74 dogs of varying breeds, ages and sexes, in a variety of contexts.
They the fed them into a machine-learning model - a type of algorithm that identifies patterns in large data sets - which had been designed to analyse human speech.
