This is a really interesting interview with the speech pathologist who owns Stella the talking dog. Stella uses an augmentative and alternative speech device, a board with recorded phrase buttons, to functionally communicate with her owner. While that sounds like jerking off dolphins territory for animal cognition, we communicate with our pets every day and they communicate back. Their larynx doesn't allow for that to go very far, so they just bark and do nonverbal cues in frustration. Given a tool that allows them to engage the vocabulary they already know in phrase structures they already frequently hear, dogs are particularly receptive to this tech.

I run reddit.com/r/wordsbutton for the topic, though it hasn't gotten off the ground. Anecdotally my own dog picked it up without any coaching, using five buttons currently only because I don't have the space for a full board. He no longer howls at me or scratches at the door because he knows that, like a gentleman, he can say he wants to go outside and differentiate between that, go potty, go get mail, and go kitchen.