As the saying goes, dogs are man’s best friend. And if you’ve secretly daydreamed about your four-legged bestie someday talking back to you, you’re definitely not alone. Sure, dogs physically can’t speak like humans — but wild new technology is making genuine communication with them feel startlingly possible.
This is no longer a whimsical what-if — it’s a full-blown scientific showdown: can dogs genuinely talk using buttons, or are they simply performing on cue?
Meet Stella — a Catahoula–Blue Heeler mix and certified viral superstar who’s been pressing buttons to “talk” with her owner, Christina Hunger, for nearly eight years now. The pair are the featured stars of the brand-new NOVA one-hour documentary “Can Dogs Talk?”, which spotlights Hunger — a TikTok sensation and the author of “How Stella Learned to Talk” — along with her extraordinary pup.
hunting covenant — Christina Hunger with her pup Stella. Photo courtesy of Christina Hunger
Hunger first dreamed up the idea of button training while working as a child speech therapist. Most dogs already grasp simple words and the actions tied to them — “go out,” “walk,” “sit” — but her years as a pediatric language pathologist helping non-verbal kids pushed her to go one giant step further.
“Kids get so underestimated the moment they can’t use verbal speech — and it was my job to find another way for them to communicate. Often that meant a device where you push a button and it says the word out loud,” she explains.
Around the very same time Hunger brought Stella home as a puppy, she was dog-sitting for a friend whose pup would ring a doorbell to signal some kind of need — though figuring out exactly what that need was usually took a while.
Turns out the whole process mirrors early childhood language development:
hunting covenant — “I remember a lightbulb moment hitting me — why don’t we just have a separate tool for each need? If dogs can understand words, then why can’t they also produce words through a device?” she began to wonder. That’s when she noticed striking similarities between Stella’s communication style and human toddlers right before they started speaking.
“She’d bark to grab my attention the way a child might cry, and she was clearly starting to understand words… I remember just looking at her and thinking, if she were a child, I’d expect her to start talking any moment — but dogs can’t talk. So what comes next for her?” Hunger explains. With little money to build fancy tech, she ordered recordable buttons and dipped her toes in, recording words she figured Stella might want to use — like food, water, and go out.
“If we were heading outside, I’d press that button and show her how she could press it too — then take her out to prove she could “say” a word using the button,” Hunger continued, admitting there was plenty of trial and error in those early days as Stella figured out the whole concept.
“For the first two weeks, she wouldn’t even glance at the buttons or at me while I was using them — but my work with kids taught me that sometimes it genuinely takes ages just to spark that first spark of interest.”
Four weeks in, Stella was already proving she could understand and chat with Hunger using just three buttons. But over time, Hunger noticed something wild — Stella began pressing the buttons to make observations rather than ask for things. Instead of tapping the water button to request a refill, for example, she’d hit it when Christina was watering the plants. Right there was Stella using the word “water” for something far beyond a drink for herself.
hunting covenant — “So there she was using ‘water’ to comment on me watering my plants — not when she wanted her bowl topped up. I was like, oh, she’s simply pointing something out,” Hunger explained. In the years since, Hunger has had two children — and now Stella apparently uses the buttons to ask where her son Max is.
Stella’s untaught knack for using the buttons for everyday commentary struck Hunger as “significant” — and inspired her to expand the pup’s word collection, eventually ballooning her vocabulary to 48 words.
In the film, Stella is shown using the buttons to express real feelings and emotions — in one tearjerker moment, she presses a button to say “love you” to Christina, who replies “Love you, Stella” right back. In another clip, Stella is alone at home, tapping the button for “Where?” as if wondering where her family drifted off to. “One day we left our apartment and set up a camera just to see what she’d do while we were gone,” Christina explains in a voiceover — referring to the heartbreaking cry Stella let out. “I had never heard her make a sound like that. It was devastating.”
Still, plenty of sceptics out there want to know: are dogs like Stella really talking — composing complex, context-aware phrases — or simply mashing the buttons they were trained to mash?
Enter comparative psychologist Dr. Federico Rossano of the University of California San Diego, who also stars in the documentary — and he’s determined to find out. He’s spearheading the largest animal-communication study ever conducted, crunching data from thousands of dogs recruited all over the world in the hunt for a definitive answer.
hunting covenant — Debra and her dog Fawkes on “Can Dogs Talk?” Photo: Anita Zvonar, © Idéacom International, Inc. and Big Wave Productions
“I hold a PhD in linguistics — I studied humans and how they communicate, and I became deeply fascinated by nonverbal communication,” Rossano tells Modern Dog over Zoom.
His team’s canine study, launched back in 2020, recruited Bunny — yet another famous button-using dog. “Then more and more people started signing up. We ended up with over 10,000 of them,” he says.
And the momentum hasn’t let up, with 10 to 20 brand-new dog owners joining the ranks every single week.
More than five years into the study now, Rossano insists there’s real evidence to back the idea that dogs like Stella truly grasp what they’re “saying.” “Based on what I’m seeing, I believe there’s pretty strong evidence that some of these dogs are using the [buttons] in a communicative way.”
hunting covenant — By the research, one thing is rock-solid: the dogs clearly understand what the words mean. In Rossano’s published 2024 study, “How do soundboard-trained dogs respond to human button presses? An investigation into word comprehension,” the team found that “dogs produced contextually appropriate behaviours for both play-related and outside-related words.”
Parker on “Can Dogs Talk?” Photo: Joseph Russell © Big Wave Productions
Reality check: not every dog is destined to become the next Stella. Success hinges on a whole mix of factors:
Curiously, no single breed rules the roost among the top performers — and yes, even the senior dogs can absolutely pick up the skill.
The abstract goes on to lay it out plainly: “Pet dogs can be successfully taught by their owners to associate words recorded onto soundboard buttons to their outcomes in the real world, and they respond appropriately to these words even when they are presented in the absence of any other cues, such as the owner’s body language.”
hunting covenant — Dr. Amalia Bastos — also on Rossano’s research team via the University of St. Andrews — compared button-trained dogs to early language learning in children. “Kids learn that a ‘ball’ is a ‘ball’ by pairing the word with its equivalent object in the world,” she notes. “That’s exactly what the dogs are doing too. They learn the labels for different stimuli and events in their environment through conditioning.”
Hot take: kids learn that a ‘ball’ is a ‘ball’ by matching the word to the actual object — and believe it or not, our four-legged friends pull off the exact same trick.
Still, Bastos cautions that we need far more proof than the anecdotal stories owners tell about their pets’ advanced chatter. “The point where button use gets genuinely fascinating — beyond simple association — is if we begin seeing dogs learn and correctly use more abstract labels, or combine them to forge entirely new meanings,” she says, which is precisely what Hunger’s Stella appears to be doing. “But we still need controlled, experimental studies to answer these questions scientifically. We hope to eventually, as we keep researching and present experiments to test how these dogs use their soundboards.”
Sascha and her dog Parker on “Can Dogs Talk?” Photo: Olle Bootle, © Big Wave Productions
For Rossano, the dream is that assistive tech will one day help dogs voice their needs — particularly when it comes to health. “Dogs being able to communicate about pain is the most exciting prospect for me,” he says. He’s watching several dogs already use the buttons to flag annoyances like noise, heat, pain, or even upset stomachs. “And then they’ll vomit an hour later — or turn out to have an ear infection.”
hunting covenant — Thinking about testing the buttons with your own pup? Keep in mind that, just like us, not every dog is equally talented — or equally motivated.
A big chunk of the research boils down to pinning down exactly which factors make or break a dog’s success at picking up this skill.
Getting involved is easy — “you fill out a survey and answer questions about yourself, your dog and their history, like breed, training, how many people are in the household, how much time you spend together. All these things could have an impact,” Rossano explains.
Want to give it a shot at home? Here’s what the experts recommend:
Of course, some dogs simply won’t care — and that’s totally, completely normal.
hunting covenant — Age and breed do factor in — just not the way most people assume. Older dogs have shown real eagerness to learn assistive tech, while younger pups may pick up bigger vocabularies. And beyond age, feel free to throw those breed stereotypes right out the window.
“There’s no one breed that makes up the majority of the top performers. It’s partly a combination of training, and how the human interacts with the dogs… but also their willingness to communicate and getting some kind of benefit from it,” Rossano notes.
“Not everyone is a math genius — but some people are amazing at it. Same goes for these dogs: a few might master 100 buttons and actually use them. A very small minority will go all the way like Bunny or Stella… and then there are plenty that will settle on six or seven and work with those,” he says.
Photo courtesy of Christina Hunger
In the end, it all boils down to trainability — and plain old desire. “If they’re mostly food-motivated, it can be tough… the dogs that do best are the ones who light up over praise or play, because they want to engage and genuinely think it’s fun.” Some pups treat the buttons like a vending machine, hitting them purely in hopes of a reward.
hunting covenant — Rossano offers some pointers to kick things off. “Start with a limited set, maybe four to six buttons,” he says, warning that there’s zero guarantee your dog will play along. “The reality is, quite a few dogs never take to it because they aren’t interested… which often happens if they already have other communication styles that work with you.”
Above all, patience is the secret — something Hunger echoed wholeheartedly. “At the start, button training really does look like you’re using a tool to get something back, but it can quickly grow into something far more complex,” she notes. “I just genuinely hope it can show people what’s possible.”
Eager pet parents can sign up online at cclab.ucsd.edu to join the study led by Dr. Rossano and his team.
*“Can Dogs Talk?” is now available to stream at pbs.org/nova, NOVA on YouTube, the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel, and the PBS App.
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