Using Google, our engineers, geneticists and pet behavior specialists built Woofer, a smart dog chatbot that shares personalized insights about pets and their needs.
Results
- Woof’s intelligence empowered customers to make informed decisions about pet products and services with the support of a ‘digital dog’;
- It allowed Woof to launch sponsored campaigns for high quality pet brands with partners;
- It informed local pet business on pet trends, and
- It transformed information and data into a virtual dog with answers about pet health and behavior, being a trusted advisor for pet owners.
Woof’s intelligence provides users with information about pet health, behavior, and products tailored to your pet’s needs.
What would a dog say if it could talk?
Who are we kidding, they’d spend most of their time telling us about what they love—but they might also give us some insights into what scares them, what they find dangerous, and how their bodies feel. What we could learn from our dogs about their health and behavior might tell us a great deal about certain breeds and give us key markers that we could use to predict the well-being of our fur babies. Even better than we can predict how a dog might communicate, we can be pretty sure that all pawrents want is for our pups to be around as long as possible.
Please meet Woofer: a virtual smart dog consultant with its own personality, sense of humor, and—most importantly—technical knowledge on pet behavior and health.
Woof, Woofer’s smart dog creator, is a data-driven marketplace focused on the wellbeing of pets. Woof is Brazil’s largest affiliate pet shop network with over 7,500 local pet businesses. After joining Google Cloud Academy’s first cohort in Brazil in 2022, Woof’s development team used Google’s technology to develop a conversational AI that shared information and products to help pawrents offer care tailored to their pets. In order to scale intelligence and infrastructure to meet high demands from users located across Brazil, “it became clear to us that we would achieve our goals quicker using Google’s infrastructure—shortening development time and making our deliverables a reality,” says David Jourdain, CTO at Woof.
The team at Woof combined internal knowledge and its database, which includes Woof.Tv’s blog posts and video content, as well as in-house expertise from team members and leading LATAM specialists, dog behaviorist Dante Camacho and dog geneticist Fabiana Michelsen, PhD.
Woof developed an artificial intelligence using Google’s framework to create Woofer, a mutt born and raised in Rio de Janeiro and adopted by two of Woof’s cofounders.
First, the marketing team set up Woofer’s profile and personality—as to why this was a crucial first step, Woof’s CEO Caetano Altafin tells us, “According to studies carried out by our marketing team and through interactions with behavior professionals, both human and canine, personality, sense of humor, and a unique identity makes an AI not only functional for its proposed uses, but also arouses curiosity and desire in the customer.”
The team then set up Woofer’s first interactions, including how he would respond to queries about his personality and temperament, as well as recommending products and services relating to specific breeds and species.
It was an efficient process—Kleisson Costa, Developer Senior at Woof, tells us, “With a clear, simplified development path and Google’s technical support, in a short time, we had our conversational AI ready to support our users and their pets.”
Woofer’ seemed to be a perfect fit for sponsored campaigns and brand launches; it also benefited the ecosystem by providing players across the pet industry with insights about the value perceived by end customers of particular products.
Woof will continue to use Google’s technology to allow its artificial intelligence to process more complex queries and improve Woofer’s results, making it a one-stop shop for information and data relating to pets, species, breeds, pet care, and pet health issues. Woof also plans to develop a version of Woofer as the company’s investor relations officer, capable of delivering key financial and operational data and dashboards.
Woof’s conversational intelligence and everyone’s favorite virtual dog, Woofer, has got tails wagging in one of the world’s largest pet markets in the globe and is already plan
