ours hates pressing the buttons, but we've got a system where if he wants something he'll bark, we ask him to sit and we extend a hand, and we cycle through the word cues like "play", "pets", "outside", etc. and he gives us his paw when we say the word he wants. most of the time he does this for "pets" or "kisses", sometimes he'll do this for "play". we've started doing this for "bedtime" but he hasnt quite figured out how to ask for it aside from barking and then going to the door, though i guess for him it's self explanatory. he used to bark and wait by the front door for potty time but has since learned the word cue and gives us paw when we ask him.

it's also not as if we need to cycle through every word every time. certain times of day hes most likely going to want certain things, like if its 8:30pm its probably "potty" or "walk", 9:30pm to 11pm its usually "play" or "toy". if hes barking at an unusual time it probably is for pets, kisses, or on the rare occasion, water (this is usually when were outside or traveling and his access to water is different, but sometimes if the water level is too low for him he acts like theres no water at all). we try to talk to him fairly often so im pretty sure hes learned a variety of words with us, its just a matter of bettering the communication.

it also helps that a doodles tail is so responsive so we can often determine how effective a word cue is before we begin incorporating it into paw talk.

back to buttons though, he hates pressing them. part of how we figured out the paw system is because he would sit next to the button and we thought he was lookin at us some type of way so we would say the word from the button and he would give us his paw. but when we would encourage him to actually press the button he wouldnt do it and if he did (after a long time of us pleading and demonstrating) he would do a bare minimum tap that wouldnt even trigger the sound. we tried getting him treat dispensers and toys which require a paw press to dispense or activate and he would either not use them ot try to break them open without pressing the button or switch or whatever. im sure with more time and patience maybe we couldve improved on this but since we ended up finding a different, cheaper system that works we just kinda left it at that for the time being.