AI for a Dog's Best Life

All of you who were once first-time expecting dog owners, you’ll remember how confusing it was knowing you wanted to share your life with a furry friend and wanted a rescue but having no idea what would be appropriate, worried of the potential baggage a rescue might bring, safety concerns, time constraints…the list goes on. ???

My goals:

1.?????? Reduce the chance of an adopter returning a rescue dog.

2.?????? Relieve time burden of pre-vetting adopters from the rescue shelter workers so that they have more time to spend with the dogs.

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The idea:

I want to build a chatbot based on an LLM (I’ll likely prototype it in ChatGPT) to ask and answer questions of potential adopters. It will be loaded with all the information and needs of an individual dog so that it can ask me, as a potential adopter, very specific questions about my current lifestyle and always put the dog’s needs first. For example:

Lizzy, a 5-year-old medium sized mixed breed, has been passed around a lot. She is finding rescue life difficult and it’s hard to get her out of her shell. She’s all but given up on ever trusting anyone. She is stunningly beautiful and easy to fall in love with. The rescue is keen to get her homed quickly but it has to be the right family to give her time, patience and opportunity to come out of her shell and find joy in life. As a potential adopter, I would go onto the rescue’s website and the chat option pops up. It asks me questions, open ended and pointed, on why I want to adopt a dog, my family and work situation, personality, preferences, lifestyle etc. I can also ask it questions and share my concerns, for example, I can’t have a dog with any past dog reactivity issues as I don’t want to put my little Springer Spaniel, who's submissive and can be a bit reserved with other dogs, at risk.

The GPT looks at the library of criteria and shows potentially matching dogs. If I ask about Lizzy specifically, it can tell me why she’s not on the list and if there was an incorrect understanding, I can correct it.

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When I go to the rescue to have a look at Lizzy, the rescue workers already know about my situation from the output of the GPT and can quiz me on additional topics or dive into specifics.

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This solution should be free for the potential adopter and of minimal cost to the rescue. Haven’t figured that bit out yet…

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I’m hoping this will support a rescue organisation’s valiant efforts in giving dogs the best chance to live their best life with their forever family.

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Call to action:

This is going to be my little pet project outside of work. I would love as much input as possible for my prototype so calling on everyone who:

1.?????? Has ever fostered and / or adopted a rescue dog and has learnings from the experience.

2.?????? Has ideas of how costs could be kept very low for the technical element.

3.?????? Any volunteers with technical expertise to help me build the prototype.

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If that’s you, please could you send me a direct message so that we can connect. I’ll be building out requirements mesh and then start my prototype. Am also hoping for a couple of testing volunteers down the line….