CleverPet Hub - Exercise Your Pet's Mind + Body

I waffled on spending this kind of money on "a dog toy," but I am glad I did. It is not a toy at all, but it is a trainer-fascinator-motivator-entertainer-teaching-tool for my dog. My dog is very food motivated and has progressed through the initial lessons quite quickly. I thought he was smart, but it is fun to watch him think and learn and now I think he is smarter than I thought. He is now up to lesson six where he has to start figuring out more than one light or pattern to get the kibble to appear. This is more challenging for his thought processes but he will figure this out soon.Buster Black is a food gobbler, so having his food portioned out more slowly is good for him and for his digestive tract. I cannot "free-feed" this dog like I could with my previous dogs using an "always there" big bowl of kibble. He would just eat non-stop. The CleverPet provides his daily ration, but he is still a bit confused a his meal times as to why I am not feeding him. He doesn't get it so far that he has already been fed. He is actually being fed more with the CleverPet than his normal rations because at least initially I wanted him to be able to continue to train and not interrupt his learning cycle when the food ran out. He has liked that a lot, but since I noticed he was getting a bit heavier, I have started to cut back on how much goes into the pod daily. I get a big kick out of watching Buster fixate on the tray.On day one he was afraid when it made noise but once he found out the noise meant food, that fear was gone in about an hour. Then, because he had a tendency to lay his feet on the touch pads while he laid down in front of the CleverPet, (slippery floors and laziness, I think) I had to change his approach a bit. Now his CleverPet is elevated on a large box so it is about chest height and he is learning to press the touch pads with his chin and nose instead of his feet. This is working better for him.We have all bought products that did not perform as they said it would or the materials were flimsy. You will not find that to be the case with this product. My dog is one that chews up so-called indestructible toys and has not been able to harm the CleverPet in any way. Also, it is quite heavy, so he is certainly not going to be able to pick it up and take it somewhere. The plastics used are really tough and even though Buster tried the digging-to-China approach to see if that would make it feed him, there are no scratch marks on it and it looks as good as it did when it arrived.When you get your own CleverPet, I think you will be wowed by the packaging. It comes in form-fitting protection and each part of the unpacking process comes with brilliantly numbered and identified tabs to guide you through the setup process. You will be up and running in no time at all with no confusion. I have never seen any product packaged like this. Great job, CleverPet folks!One last comment. I tend to always read the negative comments on a product first. One customer gave the CleverPet three stars because they said it was a good product but they had trouble connecting it to their WiFi because it was indicating that the login or password was wrong. I did not have this issue, but I know from experience that when any device has this issue, it is not a faulty device; just a connection issue. The fix for that problem is to bring up the list of broadcasting SSID's (router names) and tell it to forget the one that is yours. Then tell your phone or laptop to create a new network connection and type in the SSID and password for your WiFi router. That will solve the problem. It will not disrupt the connection to any other device using your WiFi, it will just fix the connection to the CleverPet or whatever device is having a problem.

After owning this for a month, I have decided that this product is a great product, but needs a lot of improvements. This review is based on interactions I have seen with my 60lbs lab retriever and his experience. I use Taste of the Wild (TOTW) as the kibble.Set-Up:Easy to unpack, a little tricky on the set-up. Instructions were very straightforward, and like others, I did have trouble with the WiFi connection from the hub in my studio apartment. After getting annoyed that the green light was constantly blinking to find internet, I finally moved it much closer to the router and got it to connect. Not a big deal. The app was easy to set-up, but you might run into a keyboard issue if you use G-Board because I think it was the age or gender field that the keyboard was visually blocking...can't remember which. It's a little bug, but it works. Customer service was quick and effective. It seems like there are only three customer service people working so I understand that they might not get back to some people that fast?Experience/Adaption <Dog>:At first, as expected, it took a little bit of motivation for my dog to get used to. I used bacon, cooked chicken, and a lot of treats to get this started. Once he got the concept, it was moving pretty well. After two weeks, he was at the challenge, 'Responding Quickly'. It was fun and exciting see him advance to each level. I think it was more interesting to see how he developed and evolved his techniques to each change. He went from attacking the hub, to using his nose to just tap everything, to just tapping the touchpads, to triple-touch brute force (3N) on each touch pad, to finally learning how to wait for the lights. After he used it, we would feel his head and joke that his brain was fried like a student studying for the finals. He was very persistent in getting to his food.Experience<Human>:Despite the dog's experience to grow, it did come with a lot of support from the human side. I bought this expensive item with the intention of having my dog play with it till the kibble depletes. However, the mechanics of this product has been quite a headache. A few of my friends constantly thought it was broken, but I am persistently trying to make it work. The first problem I ran into was watching my dog hit the light on target and not seeing it respond. I thought it was because he missed somehow or he pressed some other buttons first. Then when I tried it, with my index finger or gentle fist pressure, it wasn't responding. I correlated it to the consistent dog drooling as he plays which causes the touchpad to be wet. Think of it as a little patches of puddles on the touchpad. Customer service said: "the touchpads are capacitive sensors and are constantly recalibrating to respond best in their given environment, including a certain amount of moisture. However, if enough excess slobber is present, this can sometimes cause the pads to be a bit over- or under-sensitive." [1] Though that was annoying, I was relieved that my dog was still persistent enough to tackle it. If anything, this was teaching my dog to wait and be more patience. So that's great! My biggest issue here is the food sensing mechanism. Currently, "The way the Hub determines whether to add food is actually by shining a light into the dish, and if it senses enough light reflected back it determines that the dish should be filled. So, you may notice it come out empty on occasion if there's lots of slobber, dirt, or crumbs in the dish, though if you do notice this happening when the dish is relatively clean and dry that we'd probably want to investigate what else could be going on. "[1]. So unfortunately, with my dog's consistently slobbering and leaving traces of crumbs behind, the mechanism for "detecting food is presence" would result in a false positive daily. I would notice a dry drool/slob at the bottom every time I get to it. It seems to happen after 30 - 60 plays when the accumulation of physical noise causes the false positive check. This would fail to let my dog to be engaged when I go back to work. He just waits for me to come back and fix it.Recommendations/Final words:For a $300 product, I would wish to see it be a lot better. I was hoping that maybe if they released their RESTful API, maybe there is a chance I could have intervene and just program some commands to dispense more food when the hub isn't being played. My dog fortunately knows how to wait for the sound of food coming out to play. Their app could be slightly improved to maybe show like, "time stamp of last interaction" or something as such. They give you these nice reports that give you performance and plays (correct/incorrect) with max plays and play average(?). I haven't used these statistics for anything yet though.Reference:[1] Alyssa from CleverPet

I really wanted to love this product. Was really excited to buy it for my dog, and he loved it in offline mode. Was very interested in it, got really excited when he pushed a button and treats came out, etc. Unfortunately, I was never able to connect to wifi so he was only able to play in offline mode, meaning it never progressed past the first level. I was in contact several times with customer service, and they were helpful in the beginning. They suggested I return the hub and her a new one, assuming there was a flaw with the one I had received. Amazon was very easy and quick to make the exchange. Same problem with the second hub. They then suggested maybe there was something wrong with the wifi module, and mailed me a new module for me to install. Instructions were straightforward and easy, however still having problems. This time the problem was slightly different, still with wifi but was connecting this time just saying connected, no internet. However, I have yet to receive any response from customer service since!! It's been over a week now and the woman I had been messaging, who up until that point was such to respond, just completely disappeared. So after a week of trying to get in touch with her I re messaged the first person I spoke to, forwarded all my messages that hasn't been responded to over the past week, and even though it showed she'd read my message she still never responded. I tried a few more times and finally have up. I contacted Amazon and within a few hours received a shipping label to return.So as much as my dog loved the product and I was really excited about it and determined to make it work, we've had it for 6 weeks, have received a replacement hub and replacement wifi module and still no luck getting it connected. Also, the app doesn't function properly on my phone. I have a new Google pixel 2, and I can open the app and can open the link to chat to customer service (thankfully!) But every other link when I try to open it says still loading, and continues to do that Infinity.I think this product is a great concept, but it needs alot of work fixing several bugs before you buy it. I'm kind of flabbergasted to be honest about all the 5 star reviews, considering I've had replacements of the machine and parts, bad customer service, and app doesn't work and wifi doesn't work. So many different issues!Good luck of you do purchase this!