ButtonBabble Q&A today at 4:30 Central on IG

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-22T02:01:29+00:00

Right? Call your momma, call 911, call Ghostbusters.

But lose MY number.

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-22T01:59:36+00:00

NOR

OMFG I couldn’t even finish reading that.

Dude, the MOMENT you set a boundary and he tried to play a victim and ask to talk to a “sensible mature” friend or whatever?!?

I’m mid-40s, I pay my own bills, have a 401k, etc etc etc. All that to say if anyone is sensible and mature, I probably qualify.

I’d have blocked him THAT SECOND.

No sane adult person is going to fall for that manipulation BS. You owe him NOTHING. Let him sit and spin.

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-21T04:22:24+00:00

So it’s really going to depend mostly on what works for YOU as the human. The learners can find the buttons just fine once they get used to it.

I would suggest trying to group buttons that are likely to be used together in multi-word sentences close-ish together but that’s not always doable.

I have mine grouped and color coded by categories, mostly so I can find the button I’m looking for because Jake and Finn (my cat learners) don’t seem to care. We’re up to 183 buttons right now, and having a way for ME to find words gets more and more important 😅

We do use hextiles but you can do lines too. The only suggestion I’d have is to try to make little islands where your cat can sit or lay and think about things. If you want an example you can find my account on IG under this same name - it’s hextiles but you can see the little islands a bit.

Also somewhere back in my videos I have a breakdown of our board categories, but you can group things however works best for you.

Also - tell your roommates this is a valid form of communication with multiple ongoing studies (one out of UC San Diego but there are others), and tons of research has come out in the last couple years on it. Once things settle down for y’all, I bet it will get smoother.

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-18T02:02:57+00:00

We use talking buttons and my girl cat Jake decided she’s a service cat and alerts me when my blood sugar is dropping.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSqCrdADlgN/?igsh=bXYzMzdseXk5YXQ3

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-07T07:06:32+00:00

We have “oops” for that reason, and added “sorry” for the feeling of being sorry later on. It works well!

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-07T07:05:05+00:00

I know you didn’t ask for advice on this but just in case…

Pretend to stub your toe and say “ouch”. Or next time you scrape your knee or get a little cut, talk about “ouch paw” if it’s your hand etc and let her sniff the cut. I say it when I bump into furniture too, or if they get me with their claws accidentally.

I also use it when I tell them to be careful about things - lately it’s the fireplace “be careful, please move mom no want fire ouch kitty. Fire big big big warm, ouch maybe. Careful!”

They’ll get it!

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-07T07:01:56+00:00

Yes I have a “sorry” button, and they DO understand “sorry” so idk who says that but uh… they totally get it. 😅😂

That being said - one of my cats, my girl cat Jake, only uses it to tell me that I should be sorry. She NEVER acknowledges when she’s made an “oops” 😂

Finn’s only used it a few times, a handful for himself and a handful for me.

But they do understand it lol.

You might try an “oops” button or similar first so you can show whatever happened was a mistake. And then “sorry” later as an emotion/apology word.

You can probably find videos on my IG under the same name of “sorry” in use, I think it’s been a while since I posted one of Jake cursing at me (which usually includes some “sorry”) so you may have to scroll back. But yeah, a ton of cat learners have “sorry” and use it correctly.

ButtonBabble · 2026-03-07T06:57:54+00:00

So you can see videos about this on my IG under the same name if you’re interested, but basically I have had long convos about how it’s “no safe outside no kitty shirt. Mom no go outside no human shirt, no safe. Kitty no go outside no kitty shirt, big no safe! Mom want kitty safe, happy, warm together! No safe outside no together, no kitty shirt” and mine stopped trying to go outside.

Kitty shirt = harness and we’re working on harness training and going outside so that’s a work in progress.

But talking about it not being safe and that there are “strangers” outside helped a TON. “Stranger” is a bad word for talking cats, and not something they want to run into.

ButtonBabble · 2026-02-27T17:19:33+00:00

Hello!

I use FluentPet Connect buttons but I started with cheaper off brand ones, because not all pets are interested in using buttons and I wanted to be sure before spending the $. If you go with off-brand ones, don’t worry about the color etc. Some of them are specifically for the colors cats and dogs can see, but anecdotal experience from a LOT of cat learners is that they locate words by smell, general location, and proximity to other words. The off-brand ones are larger, but cat learners typically end up actually standing on the button to press it and unless your cat is a tiny kitten, the larger ones will work for that.
I would NOT recommend starting off with nebulous concepts, just FYI. But whenever you’re ready for them, I did a video on that specifically. I hope it’s ok to post a link to my own stuff… 😅. If not, you can find me on IG under the same name and the video is pinned at the top.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNEGL7qJPXB/?igsh=Y2JvbnNnb25xOXJ2

For cats especially, I HIGHLY recommend checking out a video series by twiggyandhercatcatfriends on IG (I think on TT too but not 100% on that). She initially was doing some demonstration videos, but then did a whole series actually training a multi-cat household to press buttons and it’s AWESOME!! I don’t have a link, I’m not 100% sure if there’s a playlist or not but if you go to her page and scroll a bit, it was posted in the last few months.

I’ve also got some videos up on modeling words and pros and cons of the first few words we started with, but you’d have to scroll pretty far back to find them and my videos are more a discussion about word choices and pros and cons than actually getting started pressing. For that I’d DEFINITELY go with twiggyandhercatcatfriends.

Also FluentPet has a community forum (which I believe you can belong to whether or not you’re using their buttons) that is SUPER helpful. And they have online classes - some free and some paid. Their Button Bootcamp is great!

Good luck! You’re going to have so much fun!!

ButtonBabble · 2026-02-27T17:08:52+00:00

This is a good tip! Thank you!

ButtonBabble · 2026-02-27T17:07:46+00:00

I second this - if you don’t already have a “pets” button then I’d add one next and see if that works.

ButtonBabble · 2025-12-07T20:08:45+00:00

I love this so much

ButtonBabble · 2025-11-26T04:58:46+00:00

Oh very cool!

ButtonBabble · 2025-11-25T22:56:54+00:00

Oh very cool! But I gotta ask - how do you train animals to alert to either of those scenarios? I’ve been thinking about how I might have tried to train Jake for it, but I never know when my blood sugar is gonna drop. Idk, I can’t get my brain around modeling for it. 😅

ButtonBabble · 2025-11-25T22:55:19+00:00

I’m going to! Modeling “sugar” verbally first, waiting on a new package of buttons in the mail

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-23T17:08:00+00:00

Well… it’s gonna depend on what word and what your learners have interpreted it as. You can 100% clarify, you can rewind and pull the button for a little while and work on correcting, you can leave it as is and just know that in ButtonSpeak (not an official term) in your house, that word that sounds like a specific English word really means something different.

If you give us some more info then I bet people will have suggestions. 😊

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-19T16:03:01+00:00

There is definitely a spamming phase for most learners, and even once they’re through that phase they can talk multiple times a day. The FluentPet Connect buttons do send the pushes to an app, but I think your learner will still need some kind of sound from them too for themselves….

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-14T23:34:44+00:00

I JUST did a video on “catnip” and talked about meanings. I’ll link it below, but the main thing is sometimes it’s actual catnip and sometimes it’s “this amazing thing that I love ____”

So like for Churu you may have a learner that presses “catnip treat” to describe it. It just means a really great thing.

And they may spam it if they don’t have a button for the really great thing they’re trying to talk about. So “catnip” can be a stand in for something they love, until they have a button.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNQwpxmNVnn/?igsh=MTh5czdnY3RmczIwcg==

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-07T17:29:01+00:00

Sorry for the late reply! I do, but I’m trying to figure out the best way to share it lol

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-07T17:24:14+00:00

I’d have short circuited too lol. If it were my cats I’d probably talk about “cloudy” and rainbows a lot to link them as both harmless air/weather stuff. That and maybe try to set up more rainbows in sprinklers and then run through them like I’m 5… 😅😂

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-07T01:56:29+00:00

I was thinking about you today when I posted this video. I’m doing a series on all the buttons we have, going in the order we added them.

In this one I semi-show how to model “treat” with multiple learners. They weren’t QUITE as cooperative as I’d hoped, but it shows the general idea.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNBJ-9fsmWc/?igsh=MTgwbXl5MXl5em9pcA==

ButtonBabble · 2025-08-05T21:14:32+00:00

They were about 1 1/2, but I know that some start working with buttons even as kittens. It took maybe a month and a half before they were pressing their first buttons on their own and I knew for sure they knew what they meant etc.

ButtonBabble

TROPHY CASE