I don't know if they are necessarily intended to provoke. Some are definitely intended to warn and I think greet sometimes as well based on my own dogs' barks.
I'd say that depends on the warning bark and my dogs have more than one kind. There are kinds they seem to do to sound fierce and there are kinds they seem to do in order to get my attention.
But the greeting bark is definitely not provocative, it's just "open the door now now now now now pet me!"
It's almost like an emotional state. What is complex for dogs is smell, the way they read the local bulletins posted by all the locals, their health, their sexiness score, what they have been eating, their emotional state. And then they can leave their own pmail for others to smell :)
Any good dog owner pretty quickly learns what a dog's bark means most of the time. Also, I'm not sure a bark alone without the body language to go with it is really all that helpful. I can tell so much more from my dogs' body language including things like when they're looking for a place to poo on a walk as opposed to just walking around and sniffing stuff.
You also would be a lot less likely to know that one of my dogs is super angry if you didn't know that her hair stands up like she has a great big stripe down her back when she does.
Because that's how a lone dog learns to communicate with you. That doesn't mean that their bark doesn't communicate things you cannot understand..
I would imagine this will eventually show the socialization of dogs. I can't imagine my dog, who was rescued from Hurricane Harvey in some woods in Oklahoma has many distinctive features in her barks. She would have only briefly knew her mother, otherwise she has only grown up around humans and cats.
I am sure its vastly different than other dog's barks, just like the body language is.
But why would they use the bark as communication, if they communicate fine with body language? It's pretty obvious my dog is aloof to other dogs when we are at outings, she wants to join in but can't figure out how to act more often than not.
Then there are the other dog's who do seem to communicate, verbally and else wise.
Researchers from the University of Michigan are using artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand what a dog's bark conveys about whether it is feeling playful or angry.They are also digging into whether AI could correctly identify a dog's age, gender and breed based on what it woofs.The scientists were able to make progress towards decoding canine communication by repurposing existing computer models trained on human speech.
"Our research opens a new window into how we can leverage what we built so far in speech processing to start understanding the nuances of dog barks.
"AI has enabled great strides to be made in understanding the subtleties of speech.AI-powered systems are used to distinguish nuances in tone, pitch and accent, which in turn enables technologies such as voice-recognition software.They have reached that level of sophistication by being trained on a huge number of real human voices.
However, no comparable database exists for dogs.“Animal vocalizations are logistically much harder to solicit and record,” pointed out Artem Abzaliev, the study's lead author.His team set out to discover whether scientists could get round that lack of data by piggy-backing on research carried out on humans.So his team gathered the barks, growls and whimpers of 74 dogs of varying breeds, ages and sexes, in a variety of contexts.They the fed them into a machine-learning model - a type of algorithm that identifies patterns in large data sets - which had been designed to analyse human speech.And they found it also did a good job at cocking at ear at what dogs were communicating too.On average, the researchers found their model was 70% accurate across various tests.
"This is the first time that techniques optimized for human speech have been built upon to help with the decoding of animal communication,” said Ms Mihalcea.
“Our results show that the sounds and patterns derived from human speech can serve as a foundation for analyzing and understanding the acoustic patterns of other sounds, such as animal vocalizations.”The researchers say their findings could have "important implications" for animal welfare.They suggest better understanding the nuances of the various noises animals make could improve how humans interpret and respond to their emotional and physical needs.The results were presented at the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation.Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics Institute also worked with the University of Michigan on the project.
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