I'm pretty sure most dogs are going to be able to talk, it's just a matter of exposure and access to words. My dog is smart, but definitely not doggy Einstein. There will be different levels, I'm 100% certain chihuahuas aren't geniuses, cattle and working dogs are probably smartest, but ferrets and rats and birds will likely also be able to use hundreds of words.

The thing that amazed me is that I didn't have to train my dog on the buttons after the first set. Once he figured out food, water, and outside, I just kept adding buttons and he figured out what he wanted to say. I maybe put an hour into training and treats, the rest was whatever he picked up naturally (and my consistent use of small sentences while talking to him. )

There's a whole untapped marketplace for animal->computer interfaces. I want to give my dog hundreds or thousands of words, but the buttons run about $9 a pop, so it's not financially feasible. I've been tinkering with mechanical keyboard keys and so on, but the ultimate system would be portable that allowed the animal to trigger words through a speaker on the collar. Dogs don't do fine motor control, so keys have to be big and sturdy, which makes portable hard, and so on. Maybe a laser protection keyboard? There's a product waiting to happen, hopefully someone figures it out.

Working dogs with portable communication could gain huge advantages by notifying their people "found the sheep" or "there's a wolf out there" etc.

Marine life would be phenomenal. If you could train an orca to talk, or dolphins and whales, they could complain about noise or pollution, or interact with researchers in plain English. Wild birds and weasels and even bears could be given words, it's just a matter of giving them the right interface, motivation, and a safe situation to communicate. Bears and lions have brains more similar to humans in size and morphology than most other mammals, talking to them would be fascinating.

It does expose animals to more sophisticated exploitation, but I think that the definite knowledge that these animals have an emotional inner life will make it harder to abuse them at a cultural level.

Humans are still special, but it seems more a matter of degree or depth and not anything unique in our cognitive toolkit. The more animals we give voices, the more we will see that their inner life and mind isn't as different as we thought.

Some other thoughts I've puttered around with, dogs that can speak will develop cognitive tools that other dogs don't have. They think about things differently because they can, so vocabulary and experience will cause them to develop in relationship to humans in a novel way. A 10 year old dog that has been able to speak its whole life is a different kind of dog than any that have come before. Why and how and what questions get asked and answered, letting the dog develop ideas that non speaking dogs can't achieve. It's gonna be a million times harder to see my dog pass away than my previous pets that didn't talk.

Talking buttons are a potentially huge development in human historical relationships to animals, and I think we should lean into the technology as hard as possible. A police dog that can communicate details about what it smells - k9 units that instead of alerting as a catch-all could be describing the exact thing they smell, so cops wouldn't be able to abuse it as easily. A dog could say "meth" or "roadkill" or "stranger dog" and so on, and you wouldn't go to jail for tires that smell interesting to a dog.

Speaking rats and birds would be useful for all sorts of inspection and construction jobs. Speaking service animals would be able to communicate requests for help "owner is seizing" or "owner fell down, come help please."

There's a vast and fantastical set of possibilities for profit and improving life for people and animals. If only we can figure out a portable cheap system.