FluentPet Basic Vocab Kit - Set of 12 Talking Buttons with Batteries Included for Dogs & Cats and 6 HexTiles - Customizable Cat & Dog Training Buttons for Communication - Talking Button Gift Set

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.

The box contained the buttons and hex tiles, but not the stickers or starter guide that was supposed to be in it. Disappointing.

I just got these in yesterday. My puppy is six months old and I talk to him all the time. He is so excited that he can talk to me now too. He is picking up the words very quickly and loves the buttons they are easy to use. Easy to record. The colors of the hextiles help a lot. Worth every penny. Will be buying more soon I started with 12 buttons and we are already using 4.

Most buttons have good, maybe even great sound quality, however, some have quite poor sound quality. But that is the minority. I also wish there was some guidance included as my dog struggles to grasp the concept and has touched it few times since the initiation of training in December of last year. It has been over five months and he won’t press the buttons on his own and seldom with my guidance. I don’t know what to do except keep trying.

I've wanted to try this for a long time, but waited due to the ages and health situations of my prior pets, who have since passed. I now have two 8 mo kittens, who are very interactive and constantly trying to "talk" to me, so I finally sprung for it, figuring now is the ideal time for them to learn. We're still in the very early stages of using the buttons, so my rating is not based on the efficacy of the language-learning system, but the quality of the physical product.Pros:* Buttons are easy for small paws to press.* Method is straightforward.* Physical product is quick to set up, nice looking, and well-packaged.* Different colored mats for different parts of speech is an interesting idea and seems like an improvement to their original product (which I only saw in videos, but appeared to have no color coding and to rely only on spatial memory).Cons (mostly issues due to the $129 price tag):* Sound quality is a little fuzzy (no better than off-brand buttons, which I briefly tried with a prior pet) and one of my buttons is weirdly louder and another fainter compared to the others.* When removing cut-outs to place buttons into mats, neoprene backing feels very thin. It seems like it could accidentally be punched through if one is too enthusiastic.* Sticker labels seem dog-centric, along with some oddly specific ones for a "basic vocab set" in which one can record only 12 word options. I personally might have preferred a sheet of blank labels (*ideally* ones with a wet-erase surface and a thin-tipped non-toxic wet-erase pen, so that they could be edited).* Not much can be said with 12 words, especially in a multi-pet and/or multi-human household, which needs a button at least for each pet if not multiple people. For $129 it seems like they could at least include 16 buttons. Having just a few more word options could add a lot of value in practice.Overall, given the price of this package, one might expect a little more attention to detail in terms of the product quality/usability and consideration of a larger customer base.This last thought is purely speculative and does not effect my rating, but I'm wondering if it might make more sense to have differently colored and/or patterned button tops to provide clearer visual cues to link to specific word meanings. In early online videos of Bunny (from before the FluentPet system was released) generic buttons were used that were an array of bright colors, and my understanding is that those are what she first learned with. FluentPet seems to have updated their mats to allow different colors for different parts of speech, but the buttons themselves are all still white. I realize that cats and dogs see colors differently than humans do, but they do have some shade differentiation and can distinguish between high contrast visual patterns. Is it necessary to still rely almost entirely on spatial memory, or is this making potentially limiting assumptions about how animals learn language? There are little stick-figure drawings on the sticker labels, but I suspect those are more helpful to the humans.Conclusion:I still feel optimistic about this product and look forward to seeing how (if) my cats progress with it. At the same time, I see only 2 clear advantages to purchasing this system as opposed to constructing one's own with off-brand buttons and floor mats. (1) The smaller buttons are easier for use by little paws. (2) There is no leg work, in that all the pieces are there.... Constructing one's own system would require finding the right mats and buttons, figuring out how to attach the buttons, etc., and I'm not sure how the cost would compare. I haven't seen any small paw/cat-sized generic buttons, so I would probably repurchase this, mainly for that reason.... On the other hand, I think that if I had a big dog who could handle the bigger off-brand buttons, I might have preferred the DYI route, since the button sound quality is not any better, and it would be easier to experiment with button spacing (for a larger animal) or with color-word association in the DIY case.