It would seem we are only steps away from communicating with dogs in their own language through a voice decoder. The Discovery Channel reports on the latest success:

In one experiment, the software correctly classified the barks in 43 percent of cases. “Fight” and “stranger” barks were the easiest to recognize, while “play” barks were more difficult. When matched against a human’s ability to do the same, the computer’s success was about the same.

Pet behavioral analysis? I guess 43 percent is not bad. Now if humans could just understand each other more than 40 percent of the time…