Science & Design
What is the science behind the FluentPet system?
We've known for millennia that our dogs and other animals can understand the words we say. With FluentPet customizable talking buttons and specially designed tiles to hold and organize buttons by word category, they can say words too.
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.
While it is still too early to provide scientific proof of the effectiveness of this approach, our expertise in cognitive science and years spent designing teaching tools for dogs leads us to believe that our HexTile organization method is likely to be significantly easier to remember, for any learner, than sound buttons organized in a plain square grid. By grouping buttons in categories, learners can locate buttons first more generally, and then more specifically.
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.
In the case of larger dogs (and paws!), we recommend not filling each HexTile button space and instead, leaving spaces between buttons until your learner gets more comfortable and precise with their button presses. By having a more sparse distribution of buttons, you simplify the button organization for your learner, much like how children learning to write start with extra-wide lines, moving to narrower ones as their skill develops.