You leave.
Your voice doesn't.
Roughly one dog in six shows real distress when it's left home alone. Stay listens, waits for your dog to go quiet, and answers in your voice — different words every time, never a loop.
In 2021 a Finnish app called Digital Dogsitter was put through a proper trial. It listened for the dog crying and played back a short recording of the owner's voice. Across 40 dogs, total vocalisation dropped by 95.7% after two weeks. At an eight-month follow-up, most owners still felt it was working.
But the same literature carries a warning. A single clip, looped identically, can flip from comfort into a cue: the sound that means you're gone. In 2021 there was no way around that, because you could only play back what you had already recorded.
Stay is the version where the voice can say things it never said.
- It listens
- Loud enough, mostly in the 300–2500 Hz range where barks and whines live, repeated or held long enough, and — the one that actually matters indoors — voiced. A bark has a pitch, so its waveform repeats. A door slam is just as loud and sits in the same frequency band, but it has no pitch at all. Checking for that removed most false alarms from door slams. It does not remove all of them — human speech is voiced too, so a television will still set it off.
- It waits
- Answering a bark teaches a dog that barking summons you. So Stay marks the dog as upset, keeps listening, and only speaks after two and a half seconds of quiet — it answers the calm, not the noise. If the dog never settles, it speaks anyway after twenty seconds. Nobody should be ignored.
- It speaks
- Every line is written fresh by Gemini using your dog's name and the words you've banned, then spoken in your voice by ElevenLabs. All of it is rendered before the session starts, so the answer is instant instead of four seconds late.
- It keeps a record
- Every episode and every response lands on a timeline you can read at a glance or hand to a vet — including the times Stay decided to stay quiet.
This is a prototype, not a treatment. A badly anxious dog needs a veterinary behaviourist, and nothing here replaces one.
The microphone audio never leaves your browser. Stay measures how loud the room is and which frequencies are in it. Nothing is recorded, stored or uploaded — that is a property of how it's built, not a promise.
I don't own a dog. So instead of filming one dog once and calling it proof, the detector is tested against recorded clips and the numbers are published, clips included, for anyone to re-run. See the test results.