A cat & dog sound reader for iPhone
It tells you what it actually heard.
Hold the button and PawParley listens. It works out what kind of sound your pet just made — a meow, a purr, a trill, a bark, a whine — then shows you what it measured, and offers a playful read on it.
The App Store link goes live at launch.
Bark series · dog
On alert0.9 s · pitch falling 561 → 474 Hz · narrow modulation · 6 bursts, 540 ms apart
“Something out there is worth mentioning. Repeatedly.”
The readout is the product
Every result shows its working.
Most apps in this category hand you a sentence and ask you to trust it. We'd rather hand you the four numbers the sentence came from, so you can decide for yourself how much weight it deserves.
Bark series · dog
On alert0.9 s · pitch falling 561 → 474 Hz · narrow modulation · 6 bursts, 540 ms apart
“Something out there is worth mentioning. Repeatedly.”
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0.9 s
Voiced time
Silence is stripped out before anything is measured, so this is the length of the sound itself, not of the recording. If less than a fifth of a second survives, there is nothing to read and we say so.
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561 → 474 Hz
Where the pitch went
The fundamental frequency at the start and at the end. Direction carries more meaning than the number: across the cat research, rising contours sit with friendly and solicitous calls, falling and flat ones with stress.
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narrow modulation
How far the pitch wandered
Schötz and van de Weijer found in 2014 that modulation depth — not duration, not average pitch — is the single most informative thing about a cat's call. So we show it.
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540 ms apart
The gaps between barks
Pongrácz's 2006 bins put very fast repetition, around 0.1 s apart, with alert and aggression, and slower gaps of 0.3–0.5 s with fear and isolation. Half a second is the slow end.
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2 / 5
Why the confidence is low here
Because the cues disagree. The low, falling, narrow pitch leans one way; gaps this wide lean the other. When the measurements pull apart, the honest thing is to show both and hedge — not to pick a side and sound certain.
There is no accuracy percentage on this page.
There won't be one in the app either. Published work puts human listeners at about 65% on cat call context, and the best six-way bark classification in the literature at 43%. We built a mood classifier of our own, tested it properly with the individual cats held out of the test set, and it scored below the majority-class baseline — so it isn't in the app. What ships instead is signal processing and sound identification, which we can stand behind.
The part nobody else ships
And when it doesn't hear a pet, it says so.
“Basically a Magic 8 Ball lol… I recorded silence 6 times, each time a different translation.”
— a one-star review of another app in this category
That review is the whole reason PawParley exists. Two things follow from it, and both are built in.
The same sound gives the same reading. The result is derived from the audio itself, so recording the same clip twice cannot produce two different answers. You are welcome to test it — people do, and they post the results.
Below the threshold, you get nothing. If the clip is too quiet, too short, or doesn't sound like a cat or a dog, PawParley returns no reading at all. It is a calm message, not an error, and there is no sad face attached to it.
Nothing to read
Below threshold“I didn't hear anything.”
Two real tools, not features
The whistle and the clicker are the reason people keep the app.
A tone generator that tells you the truth about your phone speaker.
Dogs hear from roughly 67 Hz up to 45 kHz, and a genuine ultrasonic whistle sits at 23–54 kHz. A phone cannot go there. Output rolls off sharply above about 19–20 kHz and collapses past 21, which is a fact of the hardware and not something an app can fix.
So we don't use the word ultrasonic, and we don't claim it stops barking. What you get is a clean, honest tone generator with the top of the dial labelled for what it really does.
- Range100 Hz – 20 kHz, continuous
- Defaulta 12–16 kHz training tone — well inside canine hearing, near-inaudible to most adults
- Labelledthe 17–20 kHz zone is marked “reduced speaker output”
- Safetystarts quiet, sessions are capped, and it tells you not to hold it near your pet's head
A clicker that lands on the beat. Free, always.
Marker training only works if the click arrives at the same instant the behaviour does. Ours is pre-decoded and pre-warmed so the sound fires in under 25 milliseconds from your tap, with a haptic on the same frame.
It isn't behind the paywall, and it isn't going to be. An app that charges for a click is an app that has run out of ideas.
- Latencyunder 25 ms from tap to click
- Feelaudio and haptic scheduled together, not one after the other
- Pricefree, with no session limit and no counter
What's inside
Five things, each doing one job.
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Sound reader
Cat and dog. Works out the kind of sound, shows the measurement behind it, and offers a playful read — hedged when the evidence is thin.
runs on device -
Dog whistle
A continuous tone generator from 100 Hz to 20 kHz, with the limits of a phone speaker printed on the dial rather than hidden.
100 Hz – 20 kHz -
Training clicker
Instant marker click with a matched haptic, for shaping behaviour the way trainers actually do it.
under 25 ms -
Sound library
Real cat and dog recordings to play back — meows, purrs, trills, barks, whines, prey sounds and toys.
74 sounds -
Diary
Everything your pet has said, kept in order, with the measurement saved alongside each entry.
stays on your phone
Nobody can truly translate an animal.
Researchers are fairly clear that a meow is a private arrangement between one cat and one person, not a dictionary anyone can look words up in. So PawParley tells you what it measured, offers a reading, and admits when it doesn't know.
The App Store link goes live at launch. PawParley is for entertainment — never for health decisions.
