Episode 47: Companion: a robot that trains your dog

John Honchariw is the founder and CEO of Companion, an automated dog training device. John introduces us to the inception of the product. He began by working on a robotics team at Google, where he had a realization: sensors can greatly help us understand the animals around us. A transition from robotics to animals? Pretty awesome. 

John saw an opportunity to use his prior experience in robotics to better understand canine movement. The movement and posture of a dog is very important, and can signal a lot about how dogs are feeling. More importantly, it is essential to see how that movement changes over time, and while it is difficult for us to remember how our dog moved 5 years ago, computers have perfect memories. John’s goal with this venture? To help dog owners maintain the essential human-animal bond throughout the dog’s life. 

Companion has worked on a limited number of dogs who suffer from separation anxiety, a relevant topic given the amount of pandemic puppies purchased during 2020. Companion steps in and gives dogs some more structure in their life - especially for dogs who now see their owners less because they are returning back to work. This device teaches your companion how to learn and keeps them occupied.

What does this device look like and how does it operate? Essentially, it is a device that includes a camera, a computer and a treat launcher. The goal is to train your dog that good things happen around the device through positive reinforcement. Once your dog is comfortable, the device starts looking for types of behaviors: sitting down, lying down or looking at the device. When these behaviors are recognized by the device, they are positively reinforced. 

When one acquires the device, you also gain access to a Companion coach. The coach is with you very intensively during the first month, to provide a white glove experience and make sure you become accustomed to the device. The app gives you direct access to your coach, where they are available for video chats during the first month. 

Interested in finding out more about the device? The website joincompanion.com demonstrates exactly how the device works and looks like. 

Will you be attending Westminster 2021? Join us for a Breeder Appreciation Party on Friday, June 11th. The event will be outdoors, at Hudson Anchor Rooftop in Tarrytown, NY. There will be free food, drinks, live music and giveaways. And better yet: dogs are welcome! Make sure to pre-register at: https://bit.ly/3f9fwGr and follow our Facebook Event for the latest updates!

Transcript

Laura Reeves [0:40] Hey, everybody. Are you excited for Westminster 2021? Join us for a Breeder Appreciation Party on Friday, June 11, sponsored by Good Dog, Embark Vet, and Trupanion. We’ll be outdoors at Hudson Anchor Rooftop, less than 10 minutes away from the Westminster site. There’ll be free food, drinks, live music, giveaways from Chris Christiansen, Revival Animal Health, and a whole lot more. Plus, you can bring your dogs and celebrate the return of dog shows with lots of your fellow breeders! Check the show notes for more information. 

Laura Reeves [1:22] Welcome to the Good Dog Pod! I am your host, Laura Reeves, and I have a super cool guest today. You guys, this is like the funnest thing I’ve heard about in a long time. John Honchariw is the founder and CEO of Companion. Companion is an automated dog training device—is that the easy solution, John? 

John Honchariw [1:48] I love it. We love to think of ourselves as a service. Our goal is to give you a really phenomenal relationship with a being you love. We do that by giving you access to this crazy, automated dog training device, in addition to a phenomenal coach and an app that helps you along. 

Laura Reeves [2:02] I love that. John, tell us specifically what you’ve developed and why you developed it, because it’s a very cool story. 

John Honchariw [2:11] A number of years ago, I got a chance to help with some of the robotics teams at Google. We were looking at a variety of pieces of new technology all around the world. The realization I had, looking at all the sensors and all those computers and everything that was going out, was: oh my god, all these sensors and computers are going to help us much, much more deeply understand all the animals around us.

Laura Reeves [2:31] Which I just think is an amazing thing—that you went from robotics to animals. How do you do that? That, I think, is the coolest mental leap. I love that. 

John Honchariw [2:45] I don’t know exactly where that came from. I’ve always been the animal guy in the family. I’m the guy who, instead of going to the local cultural sites, I want to go see the local animals whenever we travel. Whenever I see a pet parent yelling at a dog on the street, I always get really frustrated because I see two beings who are really well-meaning but just unable to communicate. I’ve always had tremendous empathy for that. I guess I just saw this opportunity. What I learned at Google in looking at a variety of different technologies was realizing how cool it can be if you find a piece of tech that does something very simple but extremely well; that has all these side benefits, especially if you have lots of time to do it with. Training and repetition. Especially in an area that people love and hold dear. It has a phenomenal impact on private folks in the home and potentially shelters as well—an area that I cared about. That’s what I saw here, this opportunity to meld both the viable and pretty interesting commercial product and at the same time help shelters, help veterinarians, help a variety of folks working in a variety of areas of animal health and welfare. You had asked about the origination story. It was this concept that all of these sensors are going to help us understand these animals. The realization was there are two things happening: 1) the knowledge that all animals primarily communicate through postures, so how we stand up. Do we hunch over? Do we shrug? How is that dog’s tail moving? The ears moving? How is that dog’s back positioned? How are the dog’s hips moving? Perhaps, as important, how does that change over time? There’s so much signal. There’s so much the dogs are communicating to us in that that we largely miss, for lots of good reasons. We’d love to know more, but it’s really hard for us to remember how your dog moved 5 years ago in that subtle difference, whereas for computers, it’s very simple. They have perfect memories. That was the insight. The animals already emit all of this signal, all of this information, but we really miss it. Now we have all of these sensors, like cell phones, in cars, in our houses, all over the world—that can much more precisely, with perfect memory and infinite patience, pick up on all these things. Like, oh my god. This is going to happen. There’s no way you don’t have all these animals emitting all this signal and all these sensors picking up on it and remembering it far more precisely and not have a much better understanding of the next 5, 10, 20 years. The thought process from there was: I want to be a part of this. What are the ways that we can help that future? What are the ways we can start to catalyze that future? My mind went almost immediately to let’s work with one of the animals that people spend a lot of time with and care deeply about and, frankly, spend a lot of money on. Because you need to create a business in order to really scale it. Dogs—that seems obvious. 2) Can you focus on something that everybody needs and that isn’t as well addressed as it could be today? Training, of course! Everybody needs it. Every shelter, breeder, vet will tell you: You have to get your dog trained. You too, right? 

Laura Reeves [5:32] I say it all the time! 

John Honchariw [5:35] But also when you think about it, it was like: That seems like a really interesting way to introduce this. And machines honestly have a bunch of unfair advantages, in the fact that they are perfectly patient. Infinitely patient. They have perfect memory. 

Laura Reeves [5:48] Which humans absolutely are not! I’ve been training dogs since I was a child and—trust me—patience is not one of my strengths. 

John Honchariw [5:56] Even though we try! We care. Machines have an almost unfair advantage in being able to do these things extremely well. Also, they can do these things extremely well and all of the behaviors that people think of as helping supplement their human–animal bond: Does my dog look at me when I call its name? Does my dog come over to me when I ask it to? Does my dog go down when I need a little calm moment? At our best, that’s what we really strive for. Can we be a phenomenal supplement and help you develop and keep that human–animal bond insanely strong? Both at the early stage, when you first get your dog, and all the way through its life. If you ask our host—we are fortunate enough to have our headquarters co-located with the SSPCA—that’s why they’re excited. If you ask one of their team members, they would say, “We like Companion because we trust them, but we think that what they can do with the human–animal bond to help people really develop that (when we all have crazy lives because we all have lots going on), they can really help you nail that early on. We think that’s so important, for not only adoption rates and adoption retention but for everyone.” That’s a long-winded origination story. 

Laura Reeves [6:57] No, I think it’s awesome, John! And I think, too, we talk all the time in various different communications through Good Dog. We talk about the importance of socializing, of training, of developing that relationship that you’re talking about. What appeals to me, what’s interesting to me, in this particular product is its uses for people in the home. Maybe they’ve been working from home during the pandemic and now they need to leave and their pandemic puppy is going to be needing some entertainment, some interaction. This seems like it might offer an option in that direction. 

John Honchariw [7:41] We’re excited about a variety of the benefits. We’ve really highlighted the training and practice so far, but honestly, I think we all are as excited about the engagement piece, being able to keep your dog engaged at home, especially as people transition from spending 24 hours a day with their companion at home to going back to leaving the house and leaving a stressed animal at home. There’s a number of different pieces of data that we’re incredibly excited about. What I would say is that we’ve seen really interesting results so far on the limited number of dogs that we’ve worked with that have anxiety conditions, specifically separation anxiety. For the folks interested out there, we published a paper on this in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior last year with some of our partners at the SSPCA as co-authors, which we’re really proud of. We don’t have large ends to say that this is a cure-all by any means, but what we have seen is that animals seem to really enjoy this engagement and it seems to help animals that have a variety of forms of anxiety. It gives them some structure. They have something to engage with as they see their loved one maybe leaving the house or as they see their loved one less over the day—whatever it might be. It appears to have this really cool effect to give them structure, give them some engagement, and just keep them learning. It’s not something we’ve talked about really at all, but beyond that, one of the tertiary benefits of working with this new class of device is you’re actually also teaching your companion to learn. You’re learning to learn as well.

Laura Reeves [9:05] Puppies have to learn how to learn. We just were talking about this last night. In one of the Good Dog Ask Our Advisors sessions, we were talking about the importance of puppies learning how to learn, even before they leave the breeder, before they get to their new home. That’s part of the early socialization that we do at 4-8 weeks, teaching puppies how to learn by giving them little puzzles. So I love that. Lifetime learners—in people and in dogs—definitely something we’re striving for. John, give us a picture. Create a word picture. What does this look like? How does it operate in, say, for example, someone’s home? 

John Honchariw [9:45] Sure. That’s probably helpful. For one, there’s videos. I’m a very visual person, so I like to see it. If you look at our website, there’s a great video. 

Laura Reeves [9:55] We’ll include links in the blog post that goes with this, so no problem.

John Honchariw [9:58] You can find how it works at www.joincompanion.com. We also have a Youtube channel. We’ve kept some of the older content from when we were just working with professional units and shelter folks. There’s actually some even more fun, nitty-gritty how-it-works in case you’re into that. Essentially, at the highest level: it’s a device that includes a camera, a computer, and a treat launcher, and a way to make sounds and hear sounds. The very first thing we’re doing is making sure your dog is having fun. The very first thing we’re training (so to speak) your dog is that good things happen around the device, and that you should come and hang out, through positive reinforcement, through treats. We use a variety of different types of treats that we certify to meet every dog’s needs in terms of the most effective and healthiest (relatively speaking) training treats. Once we have the dog comfortable/engaged (it can happen in a period of one session; it can happen in a period of a couple of days; it really depends on the dog), then we start with behaviors. We look for the types of behaviors that you want to train. Whether it’s your dog that’s hanging around the device, when your dog naturally sits down for that first time or your dog naturally lies down or looks at the device, when your dog comes towards the device—those are actually all normal things that the dog does, but there’s also another way to call them. It’s recall. It’s “down.” It’s “sit.” The very first time we see those behaviors, we reinforce in a split second. Less than a tenth of a second is what we’re shooting for. We’re huge believers in precision, patience, and very fast speeds—it’s very important from a training perspective. It gives the dog certainty.

Laura Reeves [11:31] So many people tried clicker training and failed. I’m one of those people, because I can’t click fast enough. I am a clicker trainer wash-out, because I can’t! My timing sucks. This is like, hey, perfect timing? Alright! Let’s talk some more!

John Honchariw [11:49] Exactly. I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. I totally hear you.

Laura Reeves [11:53] You just told me about crashing on your mountain bike. 

John Honchariw [11:59] You guys can’t see, but I’ve got some crutches here in the background from a little mountain bike fall. But anyway, what we do is we look for the behaviors we want to train. And your dog learns really quickly from there. You see an explosion of that behavior once your dog figures out, “Oh, when I do this, I get a treat! Those are delicious! I’ll keep doing it!” You’ll see. We’ve had dogs do 30 in the next 5-10 minutes. Just to be clear, we always are watching for the dog’s daily calorie intake first versus what we know the dog should have. We’re very conscious of that.

Laura Reeves [12:30] You could almost feed them their entire meal. One of the training tricks that we talk about is using your dog’s breakfast portion or dinner portion one at a time. This seems like it has some potential there. 

John Honchariw [12:44] Totally. We haven’t talked about any of that kind of functionality, but we’re super excited about it. Right now, for most people using the device, it’s really 20-30% of the dog’s caloric intake, but there’s really nothing stopping you from doing 100%. We want to make sure we do it right, so it’s not something we’re suggesting right now. The notion of not having the messy dog bowl—sometimes there’s a tension in the shared responsibility of making sure the dog is fed at certain times throughout the day. We can help with all of that. Specifically, we can make it so that every single meal is engaging, is fun, and your dog is learning something really valuable. By the way, we perfectly count the calories. You literally know the calories of every single piece. And we’re shooting one at a time. If your dog’s a guzzler, if you want to slow down your dog’s feeding, if you want to stretch it out—

Laura Reeves [13:28] My brain is clicking, man! So this device—I watched the video. It’s like a couple of feet by a couple of feet kind of size. 

John Honchariw [13:38] A couple of shoeboxes is how I phrase it. I think it’s 16 by 16, something like that. 

Laura Reeves [13:45] It’s not a huge thing. It doesn’t work for a dog that is in a dog crate. Or does it?

John Honchariw [13:53] Oh, that’s interesting. We can work with dogs in crates. I have to be careful with how I put this. There’s lots of things we’d love to add on in the future. There’s nothing that would prevent us from helping with the dog in a crate, as long as we can see them. Or maybe we’re not working on that. Maybe we’re working on noise sensitivity. We want to introduce sounds to the dog. Maybe we want to do other things. As long as we’re nearby, we can still work with that dog. 

Laura Reeves [14:16] Talk to me about the desensitization piece, because I love that. And that’s got a lot of potential for any of our breeders that are listening, as well as people who have dogs who are afraid of thunderstorms or any of that kind of stuff. 

John Honchariw [14:32] What I’d say right now is for the folks who sign up or for the folks who are getting some of the first waves of units, it’s going to be very simple. It’s helpful to have your dog engaging with a new piece of hardware, making new noises. Some of them are loud. Especially as we increase the launching distance, that’s helpful in its own right. If you think about it, in the future, there’s already a lot of apps out there that you can use on your phone to play baby noises, play the noises of thunder, play the noises of street cars or brakes. That’s great, and it’s really cool to have that. But it’s not really convenient. It means getting a phone or an iPad and leaving it at home. By the way, your phone or iPad can’t really replicate those sound frequencies very well, both the bass and the high-pitch. It’s not meant to be a whole-room speaker, in fairness to the phone; whereas our device is meant to be very high fidelity. It’s meant to really replicate the most important frequencies, the parts of that sound. The purpose of it is to help the dog generalize that sound of the command, whether it’s “sit” or “down” to the human and to the dog, so we have to be life-like. We have to be really authentic sounding. If you think about the possibilities for that, what that could lead to, is what if we can play? What if we can, slowly increasing the volume of each session, play noises of different things in the world that your dog will encounter before they ever encounter them and associate them with positive rewards, with positive reinforcement? We’re really excited about doing a variety of things on that side. What I’d say is we’re actively talking with folks like Fear Free and others. Generally speaking, we’ve tried to introduce ourselves as who we view as kind of some of the leading thinkers in animal welfare for all the right reasons. 1) We think they’re phenomenal folks. 2) We think the device, over time, could be great to be able to show people and demonstrate the benefits in those areas, so we love to work with those types of organizations. You had asked about noise desensitization. What I’d say right now for the near term is that even just working with the device, especially because it’s a new noise and it’s louder, we already are actually controlling the device volume based on how comfortable your dog is. Over time, we’ll be talking much more about everything else we can do there. 

Laura Reeves [16:37] The other piece of this, if I’m understanding correctly: when you acquire the device, you also acquire a coach? Isn’t that what you call it? 

John Honchariw [16:50] Yes. A Companion Coach. They’re amazing. We view Companion as a service. It’s not a device. Companion is a service where our highest aspiration is to give you a phenomenal relationship, a phenomenal bond, and help you keep it with your animal and also to be really great for your animal. A lot of our product is really around the experience for your dog, making sure they’re engaged and happy throughout the day. We strive to give that to you by giving you this first-of-its-kind device that’s all-opt-in for your dog, this app where you can see videos coming from the device, and this coach who is with you very intensively for the first month to make sure you have a white glove experience—that you love it and have all of your questions answered. They look like total rock stars for a couple of reasons. 1) Instead of the normal virtual coach or professional coach, they’re seeing your dog every day because they see all the videos of training coming from the device back into their screen so they know exactly how your dog is doing. 2) They’re phenomenal coaches. I always refer to them as service-dog-level trainers. That doesn’t really mean anything. What I can say is that they’ve trained service dogs. If you look online, the woman we have photographed is the example coach. She literally trained a diabetic alert dog in her dorm room at Princeton. It’s those kinds of folks. They’re unbelievable! I’ve never had access to that level of trainer before, at least with those certifications. The app provides not only the fun videos of what your dog is going through and highlights clips (we’ll only send you the fun stuff, the cool things going on) but it also is your portal to interact with your coach. If you have a question about the training or just anything about what your dog just did or some weird behavior you saw or some cool thing you want to learn about, your coach is right there: literally at the other end of that chat screen. And your coach is available for video chats intensely for the first month, and they’re always there in the background for support moving forward. Personally, I’ve had a number of dogs growing up. I have a wonderful rescue right now: a Beagle mix named Boomer. I was super fortunate because we have all these amazing folks in animal behavior as colleagues, so I always got to ask them the questions I had. That’s really rare. Most folks don’t have that expert source. They look online. They look elsewhere, and it’s really hard to make sense of it all because there’s so much of what appears to be conflicting information or different information. Our goal with the coach is to not only make this new type of experience magical and delightful, but we really want to give you a general safe space to ask the most basic questions but also ask pretty advanced ones, too. They can handle the advanced stuff. 

Laura Reeves [19:19] Here’s my next question, and this is going back to thinking about the dog interacting with the device. I love the coaching. I’m envisioning one of my German Wirehaired Pointers figuring out a way to get to the treats other than doing the proper behaviors. I’m asking about that. What do you do with those super smart dogs that are smarter than the robot? 

John Honchariw [19:45] Cool, they will go very quickly through the training. What we’ve found—this surprised us all. We built five or six generations now of units on the way: the early research ones, the business models, the professional versions, now the consumer versions. We used to put them basically in cages, because we always figured the dog would have at them. We’ve never had that happen, which is the most interesting thing. The treats aren’t that hard to get to. To be honest, we don’t really understand it. What I can say is that we’ve worked with hundreds of dogs. We’ve had one dog basically tear apart one of the very early devices; it was basically a plywood enclosure. But it was for a variety of other reasons; the dog had a variety of things going on and was just not in a good situation. I think it was left in the room with it in a storage room for like an hour or two while it was being transferred. Just to be clear: the dog wasn’t left alone by Companion personnel. Just to tidy that up! For whatever reason, we have yet to have a dog really break in. 

Laura Reeves [20:45] I’ll volunteer! I’ve got a couple. I got this one little Pug bitch—I’m telling ya! 

John Honchariw [20:52] That’s awesome. I have some theories as to why that happens, but we don’t actually know. We’re really curious over time to understand how the dogs perceive the device. Do they perceive it as a buddy? Do they perceive it as a semi-animate object? As a dog, what’s this thing to you? Dogs really like it but beyond that, we don’t know how to classify it. Do they look at it as another animal? Do they look at it as a dishwasher? 

Laura Reeves [21:18] It’s a toaster. Maybe it’s like the icemaker. I have dogs that learn how to work the icemaker because they want to get ice cubes. I seriously have dogs that work the icemaker so they can get their own ice cubes!

John Honchariw [21:31] That’s super cool. 

Laura Reeves [21:33] So I think they think it’s an icemaker. 

John Honchariw [21:34] Why damage the icemaker? Then good things will stop happening. That’s kind of my working theory. This thing seems awesome. This thing wants to engage with us. When I choose to engage with it and I do certain things, it gives me treats. Why would I damage that thing? Why would I attack that thing? That’s my working theory. My colleagues will yell at me for even saying that. 

Laura Reeves [21:57] You just got busted, man.

John Honchariw [21:58] Either way, you can rest assured that we haven’t had that issue yet. We’d be honestly kind of excited to see it, to understand what happens, but we also make it so that it would be hard for a dog to get into it. The treats are not that far away, but it’s not easy. 

Laura Reeves [22:14] And then I see the counter surfer. The device sees the dog go and try to find the butter plate. We have one Wirehaired Pointer rescue that was obsessed with butter. The butter was hidden in the microwave for the entire 8 years the dog lived here. I’m serious. You could not leave butter anywhere or it was gone. So, the counter surfers. That kind of thing. Can the device say, “Look, it’s doing this behavior that nobody wants it to do.” Can it distract it from that behavior and get it to stop?

John Honchariw [22:47] We can distract. I love that. Right now, we cannot do that. Well, I’d say it like this: We’re not going to do that early on. We’d be very excited to introduce that functionality later. I think you’re probably asking if this is something a device like this could do. What I’d say is yes, as long as we can see the behavior. It’s something we can help with. There’s at least two different methods. There’s “Can you teach another behavior?” or “Can you distract?” I think part of one of the big tertiary benefits of engaging your dog throughout the day is if you give your dog something really interesting and meaningful to “chew on” mentally, hopefully if they’re with a machine, they’re not going to be chewing something up at the very least. We know that. Hopefully what we’re doing is we’re really giving them some mental exercise. 

Laura Reeves [23:31] The mental exercise is huge. 

John Honchariw [23:35] Exactly. I think that’s one of the tertiary benefits. Again, we don’t talk about it too much, but we strive or aspire to provide a lot of that benefit as well, as part of the exercise and the training. 

Laura Reeves [23:43] Excellent. Very, very cool. Well, John, I appreciate your time tremendously. I will absolutely make sure that we have links to the website so people can go find out more about it and get all the details there. 

John Honchariw [23:56] Thank you, Laura. This was awesome. This was a pleasure.