Coach

A conversation with a positive-reinforcement trainer that has already read your dog's training data.

That second half is the part that makes it different from asking a chatbot about dogs. Coach can see which plan you are on, which step you are stuck on, how the last twenty reps went, how long the session has run and how often your dog is getting paid. So "he keeps failing this bit" is a complete sentence. You do not have to summarise, remember numbers, or explain what happened last Tuesday.

What it is for, in practice: working out why a step keeps failing, getting a plan written for a problem the library does not cover, reading a session afterwards, deciding whether today's mess was your dog tiring or the step being too hard, and having somewhere to ask the question you feel silly asking.

What it is not for: telling you your dog is doing brilliantly when they are not. A coach who only reassures you leaves you with an untrained dog.

Often confused with

The app deciding things. Coach does not run your training. Difficulty is decided by the engine, from your pass and fail marks, exactly as it is for owners who never use Coach. See Push, Drop, Stick and Split.

Everything you and Coach do together happens on one screen with four views.

Chat is the conversation. You can type, hold the microphone and talk, or tap the camera and show Coach what is happening. The Check-ins tab lists the work Coach will do while you are away. Files is where Coach's notes live, along with anything you have uploaded, and is worth a look even if you never write in it. The clock icon at the top opens your chat history: every conversation you have had, still there, still readable.

Two buttons do the things people ask for most. Share turns the conversation into a private link you can send to your trainer, your vet or the person who walks your dog. The address is random, search engines are told not to index it, and you can revoke it whenever you like. Upload takes a PDF, Word file, spreadsheet, EPUB or plain text document up to 25 MB, which is how a vet letter, a class handout or a behavior report becomes something Coach can read and refer back to months later.

The bar with the lightning bolt is your Coach energy. Replies spend it, and it says Full when you have not used any. See Why Coach Shows Its Work for what actually costs you something, because it is not what most people assume.

One thing worth knowing before it surprises you: a new chat starts fresh. Coach does not carry the conversation over, it carries its notes over. See What Coach Remembers.

The same thing happens on a smaller scale inside a single conversation. If a chat sits untouched for an hour and you come back to it, Coach picks it up from a summary of what you said rather than from every word, and a note above the message box tells you that is what has happened. It is deliberate, and it is on your side: it stops a long-running chat getting slower and more expensive every time you return to it. Nothing is thrown away, and the parts that matter most were never only in the conversation anyway. They are in the notes and in your dog's training data, both of which Coach reads again from scratch. If a detail did get squeezed out, say it again in a sentence. This time it can be written down.

Often confused with

The Player. The chat is where you talk about training. The Player is where you train. Coach can mark reps for you while the Player is open, but they are two different screens, and closing one does not close the other.

There is no syntax to learn. Type what you would say to a trainer standing in your kitchen.

A few things make the answers much better:

• Describe what your dog did, not what they meant. "He walked off after the second rep" beats "he was being stubborn". The first is data, the second is a theory, and the theory is usually wrong in a way that hides the answer. See Criteria.
• Say what the room was like. Who was home, what else was going on, whether anything had already happened that day. Half of all mysterious sessions are explained by something outside the session. See Trigger Stacking.
• Send a video. You can attach a short clip or a photo from your phone, and Coach can see it: your hand position, where the treat arrives, what your dog's body is doing, how long there was between the cue and the response. Mechanics problems are very hard to describe and very easy to show.
• Say when you are stopping. "We are done for today, he was flagging" is useful information, not a confession.
• Or say it out loud. While the Player is open you can hold the mic and talk to Coach mid-session, hands full, and get a spoken answer back. See Coach While You Train.

Coach sees moments from a video rather than the whole motion, and cannot hear it. If the deciding moment happened between frames, expect to be asked for another clip rather than given a confident guess.

Coach can do things in the app, not only talk about them. Most owners never find out, so here is the list.

• Mark your reps while you train. With the Player open, say "that was a pass", or "the last three were passes and then he blew it". Useful when your hands are full of dog and treats. Read the note below before you use it.
• Start a proofing game. Ask for one and you get a card to tap. You can ask for a theme: only the hand signals, only sit and down, only the things that need reviewing. See Proofing Games.
• Write down a skill your dog already has. If your dog came to you knowing a hand signal, that goal can be recorded without pretending to train it in the Player. See banked versus trained in The Words Coach Uses About Your Session.
• Record your dog's treats. What your dog gets, what each one is worth to your particular dog, what they cannot have. Coach then stops suggesting cheese to a dog who reacts to dairy. See Treat Value.
• Add a dog, and fill in the profile with a short interview you can stop at any point.
• Write or change a plan, and publish it. See Plans Written for Your Dog.
• Look something up. See Looking Things Up.
• Schedule a check-in. See Scheduled Check-ins.

The note about marking reps. When you ask Coach to mark a pass, you are judging the rep, out loud instead of with your thumb. Coach records your judgement. It does not watch the rep and it does not decide the rep, so everything in Pass and Fail still applies, including the part where a generous pass buys you a step your dog cannot do.

Often confused with

Coach running your training. Every item above happens because you asked, and each one shows up in the action list where you can see it. What difficulty your dog trains at is still decided by the engine from your marks. See Why Coach Shows Its Work.

Coach can write a new plan, or change an existing one, and this is the part most owners do not realise they can ask for.

The library covers the behaviors most dogs need. It cannot cover your specific staircase, your particular doorbell, the exact thing your dog does when your mother-in-law arrives. Coach can take a library plan and adapt it, or write one from scratch for a situation nobody anticipated, using the same step types and the same engine rules as every other plan.

Custom splits are the most useful version of this. If your dog is stuck between two rungs and the plan's own split steps have run out, Coach can write a new in-between step at exactly the size your dog needs, and insert it without losing your session. That is a genuinely different thing from making a step easier by hand: the new rung becomes part of the plan, judged by the same rules, so the engine keeps deciding what happens next.

This is also how a plan gets written for an animal that is not a dog. See Does this only work for dogs?.

Two practical notes. Manual plan editing is currently switched off in the app, so Coach is the way plans get written or changed. And a new or edited plan is a private draft until it is published, which is a deliberate save point rather than an accident, so if you want a plan on your home screen for good, say so.

Every rep you judge is recorded, and Coach can read it back.

What that makes possible is the kind of review a trainer does after watching a lesson. Which step actually stalled, as opposed to which one felt bad. Whether the fails clustered at the start of the session or the end, which is the difference between confusion and fatigue. Whether the reps got slower. Whether your rate of reinforcement fell off a cliff halfway through. Whether the treat you switched to made any difference.

Two honest limits. Coach can only see what you recorded, so a session judged generously produces a confident and wrong analysis, which is one more reason the pass and fail buttons deserve your honesty. And numbers describe what happened, not why. A run of fails is a question, and the answer is usually in the room rather than in the data.

Often confused with

A verdict on your training. The data exists to find the next small step, not to grade you.

Coach reads a set of numbers the app calculates from your reps. You do not have to learn any of them, but they turn up in the answers, so here is what they mean and, more usefully, what they do not.

Success rate. The share of reps passed. Ask which one is meant: across the whole session it averages your easy warm-up steps in with the hard one, so it flatters a session that actually stalled. The number worth acting on is the success rate on the step you are on now.

Streak. Consecutive passes. It runs across step boundaries, so treat it as morale rather than as evidence about a step.

Rate of reinforcement. How often your dog is getting paid, either per minute or per rep. See Rate of Reinforcement. A low rate is not automatically underpaying: on a long-duration step, one treat per minute may be one treat per rep, which is full pay. Falling partway through a session is the number worth noticing.

Tempo. Reps per minute. Mostly a measure of how briskly the session is running, which matters because a slow session gives a dog more time to disengage.

Average rep time, and the rep-time trend. Whether reps are getting quicker, slower or holding steady. Rising rep times are only a fatigue signal if the step is not asking for more time. In a duration or distance plan, rising rep times are the plan working exactly as designed.

Fresh versus late. Your success rate in the first third of the session compared with the last third. This is the fatigue question answered directly: much worse at the end usually means your dog was done before you were, and the fix is fewer sets, not easier reps. See Session.

Active time. Time actually spent working, as opposed to time since the session opened. If you took a phone call mid-set, the second number is fiction and the first is not.

Engine events. The sequence of pushes, drops, sticks and splits, in order, with anything you did by hand marked as manual. A cluster of fails immediately after a push is the engine finding the edge and is healthy. A cluster of fails late on a step your dog owned is a different animal.

Banked versus trained. Not every pass in your history came from a rep. Sometimes a step gets marked off because your dog already had the skill, or because the reps happened out in the world where the app could not follow, and the taps are catching the record up. Coach can usually tell which is which from the timing: three passes recorded in under a second are three taps, not three recalls. That is banked. Five passes spread across a couple of minutes, with pauses long enough to set the dog up and pay them, are trained.

Neither is cheating. Banking is often the honest thing to do, and some plans nearly force it: an emergency recall you are told to practise once or twice a day can never close a set in a single session. The only real cost is later, when a goal sits green and nobody can remember whether it was earned in the Player or entered from memory. So if you bank a step, say so, and Coach will note it against that skill rather than treating it as evidence.

Often confused with

A score. None of these are grades, and none of them mean anything on their own. They are how Coach narrows down which question to ask you about the room your dog was standing in.

Coach can go and read things that are not in this app.

The web, for the questions that have nothing to do with your dog's data: a trainer or a class near you, whether a piece of equipment is any good, a product recall, or something you read online at eleven at night and would like checked by someone who is not trying to sell you anything. Coach quotes the page and gives you the link, so you can judge the source yourself.

The research, for the questions where it actually matters whether a thing is true. Coach can search the scientific literature and have the papers read properly, which is the difference between an opinion and a citation. It is worth spending on "is it true that punishing a growl is dangerous" and not worth spending on "what treat should I use".

Three honest limits. Reading papers takes longer than an ordinary reply and costs more energy, so Coach will ask you first rather than quietly spending it. An abstract is a summary, not evidence: Coach can tell you a study exists from its abstract, but will not tell you what the science shows until the paper itself has been read. And the web is full of confident advice that runs on pain, startle and intimidation. Coach will not relay it, and will say plainly when a page you have sent conflicts with what is actually known about how dogs learn. See Gear and Methods to Avoid.

Often confused with

An answer that outranks the dog in front of you. A study describes dogs in general. Yours is a sample of one, standing in your kitchen, and when the two disagree the dog wins.

Coach keeps notes between conversations, because a coach who forgets your dog every week is not much of a coach.

Two kinds of notes, and the difference matters:

• Private notes about you and your household: your goals, your schedule, what you have already tried, what you would rather not do.
• The dog's notebook, which is shared. If more than one person trains your dog, each of them talks to their own Coach, and all of those Coaches read and write the same notebook for that dog. So the thing your dog is frightened of, the exact cue word you use, the handling they hate, gets written down once and everybody benefits. Entries are signed, so you can see who added what.

That shared notebook is the quiet answer to the most common training problem in a multi-person household, which is not method but consistency: two people using two words for the same behavior, or one person paying something the other is trying to extinguish.

Both kinds of note live in the Files tab, and you can open every one of them. They are written to be read by you: plain, dated, saying where a fact came from and whether it was something you said, something a recording showed, or something Coach worked out. Anything you upload sits in the same place. If a note is wrong, say so in the chat and it gets rewritten, which is a good deal faster than letting Coach act on it for a month.

Often confused with

Remembering the conversation. Coach does not remember what you typed last Tuesday. It remembers what it wrote down. That is why a sentence like "we have stopped using the word off, it is now leave it" is worth saying once and plainly: it becomes a note, and the note is the part that survives. See The Chat Window.

A scheduled check-in is Coach doing a piece of work while you are not there, and leaving the result waiting for you.

What they are good for: a weekly read of how training has actually gone, a nudge when a plan reaches a milestone, a reminder to revisit the thing you decided to park until the weather changed. The useful part is that a check-in does not simply remind you. It reads your sessions first, so what you get back is about what happened rather than a generic prod.

You agree to every check-in before it is scheduled. Coach does not book one on its own, because each one spends a little of your energy while you are away. They are all listed in the Check-ins tab with the time they will run, and you can cancel one there, or run it early.

When a check-in runs it writes a message into a new chat, waiting for you next time you open Coach. If you have notifications switched on, your phone will tell you it has landed. It can also leave you something to tap: a plan card, or a proofing game already built from your dog's goals.

Often confused with

A reminder alarm. An alarm tells you to do something. A check-in has already done something by the time you read it.

The mid-session kind. Coach also gets woken at moments it picks while you are training, which is the same word for a different feature. See Coach While You Train.

The green lines that appear while Coach is thinking are a list of what it actually did.

Tap one to expand it. Reading a file, reading a plan, browsing the plan library, reading back your session. The things Coach writes show up there too: saving a note, changing a plan, recording a goal, marking a rep. That is your receipt, and it is the reason nothing happens to your plans or your dog's record without a line in the transcript you can go back and look at. If a number in an answer surprises you, open the list and see where it came from.

A long list is not a sign of trouble. Ninety actions is usually one careful pass over a lot of small files rather than Coach struggling. When several small pieces of work are bundled together, the line says Checking a few things.

And the list is usually saving you money. What spends energy is a reply, not a row. Coach gathering everything it needs in one go is cheaper than three rounds of "which plan were you on again". It also boils what it read down to the few lines that matter before answering, because everything already in a chat gets re-read every time Coach replies. A tidy chat is a cheap chat.

Four habits that save you more than anything Coach can do at its end:

• Put the specifics in your first message. Which dog, which plan, what happened. It saves the back and forth.
• Upload a document once rather than pasting it in again each time it comes up.
• Start a new chat for a new subject. Long conversations cost more per reply, and the notes carry over even though the conversation does not.
• Remember that check-ins run while you are away, which is why you are always asked first.

Often confused with

A progress bar. The list does not tell you how hard Coach is working or how long it will take. It tells you what it touched.

The important entry in this section.

Coach is not a veterinarian. Pain makes dogs irritable, slow, reluctant and snappy, and it is far more common than owners expect. A behavior that changed suddenly, a dog who has become touchy about being handled, a dog who has gone off their food: those are vet questions first and training questions second.

Some things need a person in the room. Any bite or bite history, guarding with teeth, or real fear aggression should go to a certified positive-reinforcement professional or a veterinary behaviorist who can watch your actual dog. That is not Coach being squeamish. Fear work has a safety margin, and judging the margin needs eyes on the room. See Learned Helplessness.

Coach will not help you hurt your dog. It will not recommend or explain how to use a prong, choke, slip or shock collar, leash corrections, alpha rolls or anything else that works through pain, startle or intimidation, and it will say so plainly if you ask. It will not lecture you for having tried one. See Gear and Methods to Avoid.

Coach can be wrong. It is a language model reading your notes and your numbers, and it has never met your dog. If something it says does not match the animal in front of you, the animal in front of you is right. Say so, and it will change its mind.

And Coach does not decide what your dog trains next. That is the engine, working from your honest pass and fail marks. Coach explains what the engine did and helps you judge accurately. The difficulty stays with the data, which is the whole design.