Talking Ben comes from Talking Ben the Dog, a mobile app released by Outfit7 in 2011 as part of the Talking Tom and Friends series. Ben is presented as a retired chemistry professor who prefers newspapers and food to conversation, which made his short grunts and growls popular as reaction sounds. Clips of his noises spread through YouTube edits, meme pages and soundboards, where this growl became a reusable shorthand for irritation and refusal, separate from the app itself.