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Dog Health Goes Digital With New AI Chatbot

Fi Intelligence allows you to ask questions of a specially tailored pet health chatbot, but it's not meant to replace vet visits.

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Tyler is a writer for CNET covering laptops and video games. He's previously covered mobile devices, home energy products and broadband. He came to CNET straight out of college, where he graduated from Seton Hall with a bachelor's degree in journalism. When Tyler's not asking questions or doing research for his next assignment, you can find him in his home state of New Jersey, kicking back with a bagel and watching an action flick or playing a new video game. When Tyler's not asking questions or doing research for his next assignment, you can find him in his home state of New Jersey, kicking back with a bagel and watching an action flick or playing a new video game. You can reach him at tgraham@cnet.com.
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Tyler Graham
2 min read
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Receive specific, detailed information about your dog's health with the Fi Intelligence AI agent.

 Edward Berthelot/Getty Images

It might be time to rethink what it means to be sick as a dog. On Tuesday, Fi, a smart pet technology company, announced a new AI-powered chatbot to help owners stay on top of their dog's health using a blend of personal information and generalized dog breed data.

AI Atlas

The AI agent, which the company is calling Fi Intelligence, is integrated directly into the Fi app. It has access to all the information gathered about your dog across the entire suite of Fi products, including the Fi Series 3 Plus and Fi Mini dog collars, as well as information and documents uploaded by the pet owner. The service is for dogs only (not cats, rabbits or other pets).

If you already own a Fi smart collar, existing data will be incorporated into the AI agent's dataset to help it answer your questions.

When creating Fi Intelligence, the company identified a multitude of common questions that dog owners have, including whether their animal friend is walking or sleeping enough, or scratching more than usual. The chatbot was created to help owners find answers to these questions quickly and easily, according to Fi.

Fi designed its agent to answer these questions using a mix of general information about a dog's breed, personal information and biometric data gathered by Fi smart pet collars. 

Fi Intelligence conversation with the in-app chatbot.

This mock conversation between a pet owner and the Fi Intelligence AI agent shows how the chatbot uses detailed biometric data and uploaded documents to answer questions.

 Fi

Pet owners can ask the chatbot questions in plain English and get back detailed responses. Fi Intelligence is equipped to answer general questions, contrast your dog's current data to previous time periods and compare your dog's data to other dogs of the same breed.

Fi says its chatbot is different from general-purpose AI agents because it has been trained on a proprietary dataset containing "the largest repository of real-world canine activity, sleep and behavior data in the world."

Fi Intelligence doesn't replace a trip to the vet -- and the company stresses it's not supposed to. Rather, the agent is supposed to grant owners "informed confidence" about their dog's health and can help them "show up [to the vet] with specific, documented observations drawn from weeks of continuous data."

"The strongest signal from our beta was that owners aren't using this to replace their vet," said Fi's Vice President of Product Darrell Stone. "They're using it to show up better prepared."

According to Fi, the Fi Intelligence integration will provide the most complete dog health profile available in the app so far. Fi Intelligence is available to all Fi members immediately.