CleverPet 4+

We bought our Clever Pet for Christmas and were really excited. Unfortunately our dog is not as clever as we anticipated and we are still always resetting it to two lights. Boo, disappointed parents (not your fault).

Pros: the equipment is super sturdy, holds up well to his pawing and holds plenty of food!

Cons: 1. The graphs are awful. There should be a breakdown for just the day instead of the week. I can barely read it.. think FitBit or Garmin dashboard. I want to be able to see what time of day he plays with it, how many tries in a row, etc.
2. When my dog is getting it wrong by selecting the same light over and over again, I wish the hub would not light that pad up so he’s forced to think!

The CleverPet has been a great way to keep our active, smart dog occupied while we’re away during the day. The hardware is great -- after a year, it has never jammed, and our dog has never broken into it or flipped it over (although she can push it around a bit on the floor).

The app, on the other hand, is kind of a mess. It has 3 purposes:
1. Teach you what to expect as your dog learns to use the device. It does a good job at this, with videos and text.
2. Allow you to see stats about your dog’s interactions with it. This functionality is pretty anemic, with the graphs not large enough to make out and not high-resolution enough (values are all daily) to do anything with.
3. A couple of key “reset” functions: tell the device you just put more food in it after it had run out, and move back to the previous stage if you want to decrease the difficulty for your dog. I kind of wish these had just been built into the hardware itself (especially the first one, because now I have to have my phone with me to feed my dog, and adding a sensor to tell when new food has been added seems relatively simple).

The app is structured around an activity feed that mixes all the concepts above into one stream of swipeable things, but now that I know how to use the device I kind of wish it was just two buttons and a graph, and the videos were hidden away somewhere else.

I’ve had my hub for a few years now and let me tell you when something goes wrong and you need to get in contact with someone they don’t always respond in a timely manner. For about a week or more I’ve been running it offline. I have reached out a few times to the help team and have heard no response. The crazy thing is there are times when all it takes is the flip of a switch!!!! I know this bc one of the girls said “oh we just needed to flip a switch on our end!!!” 🤦🏻‍♂️ I’ve began to hate this food dispenser so much bc of how much it disconnects! I go out and come home to find my dog hungry bc it’s not connected or something.