FluentPet Speak Up! Key Vocab Kit with Clearer Upward-Facing Sound - 12 Recordable Buttons w/Pre-Installed Batteries, 6 HexTile Button Mats - Training Dog & Cat Communication Buttons

Clear audio, easy to set up.

Not sure what I expected when I bought these but now, 6 or 7 months later, I'm blown away! The first couple weeks were slow while I found my footing and learned what I really need to do to be effective at teaching my dogs and cats to use buttons. The Button Bootcamp in the Circle app (included with purchase) has been helpful. Here are some things I've learned along the way I wish I'd known going in. Like I see others do, I made this process more difficult than it needed to be in the beginning. I added one button COOKIE right away before realizing we really don't usually have cookies (treats) inside, mostly outside, so they really didn’t use it. Then I read somewhere to add 3 to 6 buttons all at once and just use the appropriate one before each action. For example, before going outside I verbally say "outside" then press OUTSIDE then take them outside. This is called modeling. I repeated every time. No extra words, just modeling the button and its action with verbal also. In just a couple days one of my dogs began using the buttons. He could tell me when he wanted outside, or eat, water, etc. Give your learner silent time to process the new language and skill you're teaching. We talk to our dogs like they understand us but silence says so, so much more. Body language is more powerful. After modeling a button, give him up to 30 or even 45 silent seconds to think it over and respond. Watch him for body language or context clues. You model OUTSIDE and after 30 seconds he goes to the door and looks at you, that is a direct response! Honor that. The first words you teach should be basic core words. EAT can be for meals or snacks or food rewards (food as a reward should be avoided when teaching buttons. Let the button action be its own reward - for example if OUTSIDE is pressed, taking him outside is the reward.) WATER can mean drink, rain, etc. OUTSIDE can be for potty or play. You can add clarifying words later, start with the basics. Your dog will likely take time to "babble" and "map" his buttons. Babbling is just what it sounds like Pressing buttons just for the sake of pressing buttons. Every time I add new buttons, he presses it several times in a few days just getting to know the button. I've learned that when my dog Major wants to talk to me he will always wait for eye contact. He will press a button then either turn to look at me or look in his mirror to see me. That's my context clue that he's talking to me. Sometimes he will just go over and press a lot of buttons and not make eye contact. He's just making connections for himself in his own brain. Learn how your dog communicates directly with you as opposed to babbling or mapping, it will likely have some eye contact. Spend time enough with the buttons yourself so you also have the muscle memory to model effectively. Give your dog the ability to make decisions for his own life. A simple option of YES and NO buttons is a great way to start. My dog Major has 40 active buttons now and over 50 more ready to add. I try to stay ahead of him, meaning I try to have more words on the board than he knows. He learns so quickly it can be difficult at times on a fixed income. He is my main user out of 4 dogs and 2 cats. The others use them sometimes but really don't care much. They're good communicators without them. Major talks up a storm every day. He likes to narrate his life and surroundings and even manipulate his family! He will press COOKIE then look at the other dogs. Simon always jumps up and runs to me when he hears the cookie button and Major will steal his spot! This is almost daily! Lastly, making mistakes is an essential part of learning and growing. Give yourself (and your learner) grace! Like humans, dogs and cats and other animals are intelligent, emotional beings. We all make mistakes and can all learn from them. There's no exact right way to do this but you can't be successful if you don't try. The quality of these buttons and hextiles is exceptional. The battery life is likely standard. I purchased a package of 100 spare batteries so we're ready for that time. Each button holds 3 little batteries. The Speak Up buttons are quite loud and for myself, at least, can be heard well throughout most of my home. You might consider the FluentPet Connect buttons if you're harder of hearing or wish to get text alerts on button pushes while you're gone. I can't afford those but these Speak Up buttons are great. I used velcro tape to stick his sound board to the floor and stop the sliding. He's 110# of lap dog and doesn't realize his paw strength sometimes. I also bought a little thermal label maker. The stickers that come with the buttons don't have enough contrast for me to be able to see them while standing. The labelmaker was about 20$ and solves that problem for me. Good luck and enjoy the process! For us, it's been life changing!

It works well, but not dog does not. Only problem I knocked it down for was the mat is very chewable and scratchable.

This was a good vocab kit, it just didn't interest our dog who recently suffered a stroke, so we had to return this. If we were able to test this out pre stroke, it might have been a different story if we would have kept the set. Overall, they were good quality, although a little bit on the small side. I think my dog would have had an issue with how small the buttons were.

Update: It sucks that you can't really know how good a product is until you've used it for a while, and by then it's too late to return. Ultimately, I would not buy these again. They were not a good fit for my dog. He's a Corgi, which is pretty small, and so small buttons seem like they should be fine for him, but he has so much trouble hitting them. He will press the button repeatedly with his claws, and no sound will come out, and then I have to press it because it only works if you hit it directly in the middle, and that's really hard to teach the dog and it slows the training down a lot because to him, it seems like the button doesn't always work, and he feels like he has to dig at it and attack it to make it work. They also lose the recording about once or twice a week, and I have to re-record it, which again slows training down when he presses the button. Finally gets it right after so many tries, and it just says to make a recording please blah blah blah blah blah. So annoying. I think that these would work better for cats, but then I looked on Reddit, and a lot of people are saying that they're hard for their cats to press, which I understand because they just don't press well. So, as weird as it is, I don't know why these are one of the top recommended because they are hard for animals to use. They don't hold their recording, and I've even heard that some people's cats have gotten sick from eating the foam before. Not a huge fan of these, and I'm going to keep looking for others. Also, people like to say it's great that it comes with instructions, but we tried to scan the QR code to find the instructions, and we could not find them. It just sent us to a random video that wasn't even the first video and acted like you had already watched something, it wasn't helpful. Just really overall, I'm not impressed. I like these buttons, but they also have some downsides that make me wanna look for other options. First, I wish they made it more clear that these are more for cats. Because I bought them for my dog and he's a corgi, which is a smaller dog, but even for him, he has trouble hitting them because they're so small and he's still learning. It's kind of hard to teach him. But he'll paw at the little felt area where the button is and he'll paw at it very quickly digging into it trying to get the button to go off. Sometimes it goes off right away sometimes not. And he'll h get frustrated when he paws at it but it doesn’t go off, which is just really hard for him. He's still learning. But if the button was a little bit bigger, I think he'd have more success. Second, they're starting to get claw marks in them from the times that he's scratching them trying to hit the button. So the durability is kind of questionable. They're made of the same little foam material that kids' little puzzle mats are made of, but they're super thin. It's like less than half an inch thick. So I feel like for the price, the materials could be better quality. They could be thicker foam, and they could have bigger button options for dogs. Thirdly, more than a few times when my dog pressed the button, it somehow had reset itself, which there isn't a way to do that unless you switch the switch on the back, which my dog can't do because the button is inside a little puzzle piece. So they just kind of automatically randomly reset themselves somehow. And it happened twice to two different buttons. Fourthly, the buttons come with a sticker sheet of common words, but the words are not cut out or anything, so you have to manually cut it out with scissors or write it with your hands. The buttons are so small that it's hard to write that small. So, I just cut out the words manually. I don’t know why they don’t just pay 2cents extra to have the words pre-cut out. Finally, it's a little tricky to figure out how to record it for the first time. You have to hold the button down to record and then release it when done. All in all these buttons work and are good quality and nicely presented, but maybe the quality is more for cats than dogs with large claws. I’m going to keep using them and see if it improves once my dog learns to be more accurate with them. So far he just thinks pressing the button is a trick he does that I reward him for, he doesn’t seem to get that he can press them any time he wants something.

Of course, we've seen so many YouTube videos of the pets who use these buttons, and we're enamored with the idea of our cats using them. I downloaded am iPhone app called "The Simple Clicker" free version, which, after a few sessions, I decided to purchase the Pro version of since it's only $1.99😃 First, I "charged" the clicker, meaning that every time you click, you give the pet a treat so it learns to associate the sound with a treat. Next, I had to train our cats to become comfortable with stepping on the neoprene pads. The first step was placing treats on the mats for 2-3 sessions. It seems like our cats didn't like the texture of stepping on the mats. I think it's also worth noting that it's likely a very good idea to allow the mats to sit out for a few days--outside of the package -- so they can off-gas, (meaning release any volatile compounds that give it that weird odor. in case you’re wondering, I did look it up, and neoprene is not likely to be toxic to humans, so I assume it is also not toxic to pets. However, I figure if I can smell that smell, then it’s probably offensive to most pets as well. Granted, I am very sensitive to odors, but still, I am sure that any animal is even more sensitive to odors than I am). The next step will be getting the cats to put their paws on the button. I really do not know how I am going to do that, and I have not gotten to that part yet. One other thing to note is that training is recommended to be done before regularly scheduled meals occur, that “treats“ should not comprise more than 10% of an animal diet yet should still be within Reasonable dietary nutritious guidelines, and that crunchy treats are a great opportunity to promote the animals dental health. And I haven’t done research on this part yet, but I am sure there are published recommendations for ingredients and macros for treats according to the type of animal you have. Anyway, I seem to be our pets favorite animal for the moment ha ha ha because I’m the one giving them so many treats! I also found that, depending on I’m not sure what 😆 sometimes, I can use their regular kibble as they’re reinforcement with the Clicker, seems not only much more economical but also very likely more nutritious as well as well yeah more nutritious but I have found that both cats, at different times, have found the treats I mean they’re they’re regular kibble to be motivating at sometimes and not motivating at other times. As you can see from the picture, Billie (eating) found their regular kibble to be motivating during this session, but Ella (on the right) didn’t. During the next session, they reversed! 😆 By the way, fluent pet does give you a link to download their free training guide as well as resources to join the quote fluent pet community once you purchase the item and give them your email. I mean I’m sure the email is for marketing but, so what, right? 😄 So, if I am successful in getting our cats to press the buttons, then we will expand two more tiles. We I am having so much fun with this! And it’s providing great bonding time with the cats, they are clearly enjoying it, L and funny thing is that my search of none suggest making the First button be a treat button. However, the fluent pet res pet to think that the only purpose for pushing a button is getting food treats. So that makes me question whether I should have charged the clicker with food at all. But anyway, here we are, so I don’t know… At any rate, the cats and I are having fun! I highly recommend this as well as the app I mentioned! I can’t wait to make more progress!

I love being able to communicate with my cats!! One picked up the buttons very quickly (he is food motivated to the max) and the other is still learning to press them but understands that touching them means she gets things. I probably gave them too many buttons too fast but with consistent daily practice they are coming around really well!! Decide where you want all 12 buttons first so you're not changing placement while trying to teach them. Introducing 2 cats to these, I also have 2 treat buttons and have to do individual practice with each of them. But this is a great product!!

Adopted a 10 mo old pup in October ‘25 and quickly realized he was smart as a whippet (heh heh)! He’s a great mix of a bunch of large breeds. I bought him these to teach him to communicate. The size is great for his paws. At first he was pretty aggressive with it and buttons flew all over the place, but he soon learned to press them more gently and still get the sound. I really like the mats that hold the buttons. It’s super helpful to have the buttons secure. My dog now independently uses 7 buttons. We just started in February! I highly recommend these buttons, but be ready to have your own voice yelling things at you.

For the price of this product I was totally expecting better. The sound is loud enough but the quality is actually quite bad, it sounds very muffled. I have purchased cheap non-branded pet buttons with much clearer sound quality. The reason why I purchased this was because the buttons were advertised as "light touch" and while the buttons were lighter to press than other pet buttons I have purchased, they are still too hard to press for a cat, makes training very difficult.

We're still in the learning stage, but these are great buttons. I'm excited thinking about the possibility of having a "discussion" with my dog in the future and learning more about what she thinks about.

Good quality. Rather expensive.

Poor quality. All of the buttons are the older first generation model that has the speaker on the bottom and no holes on the top. That makes the volume quite faint. If I'd realized that I would not have ordered this set so I'm pretty disappointed. Also 3 of the buttons don't work properly - the seem to have speaker issues and are more quiet and/or crackly. I do not recommend this set and I plan on returning it. For the price this feels like a rip off as the quality just isn't there. I own the next generation buttons as well (the ones with the holes) and they are a lot better. But of course you can't order a tile kit with those buttons on canadian amazon. Kind of wish I had no decided to go with fluent pet in the first place. I may look around for other products that are compatible with the buttons I have.

我が家の小型犬はビビリでボタンを押す力が弱いです。他のボタンを使っていましたが、押しているのに反応しないことが多く、だんだんボタンを押さなくなってきました。 日本で発売するのとわかり、すぐに購入しました。 我が家には超大型犬と小型犬がいるのですが、力の差があるのに、同じように反応してくれるので、ボタンを押す回数が増えています。 先ほども、おさんぽのボタンを押すので「おさんぽ？」と聞くとワン！と返事をしてくれます。 お水、おさんぽ、抱っこ、おやつのボタンを用意しています。 犬も気持ちが伝わるのが楽しい様子です。 もっとボタンの数を増やしたいと思います。