Christine Hunger is a speech-language pathologist. She has been teaching her dog Stella to communicate in English with a custom soundboard since Stella was a puppy. Stella can press buttons to bring up words she knows (29 words so far), and even more important, has been stringing words together to relay a thought. Those thoughts are exactly what you’d expect from a good dog. The video is below but might take a few seconds to load. Don’t forget to turn the sound on!

Last night, right before this video was taken, I accidentally said “ball” on Stella’s device while I was actually reaching for a different word. But, Stella took this very seriously! She picked up her ball, dropped it on her device, and said “Good” (Translation: Good idea, Mom!)
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I started recording right after she said “Good” and caught the rest of her thought: “Happy ball want outside!”

Read about Stella and her skills in an interview at People, or go more in depth and follow Stella’s progress at Hunger’s blog Hunger For Words. If you just want to see more of Stella in action, check out YouTube or Instagram.

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Tags: communication, dog, soundboard