“If I could talk to the animals, just imagine it, chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee,” sang the actor Rex Harrison in the 1967 movie Doctor Dolittle. “Imagine talking to a tiger, chatting to a cheetah. What a neat achievement that would be!”
Talking to animals may have seemed like a fantasy in the 1960s, but it may soon become possible thanks to AI.
The sounds that animals make to communicate with each other have patterns that other members of their species understand, but these patterns are hard for humans to identify.
However, AI is very good at finding patterns if it is given enough data. And because AI can sort through millions of sounds to find such patterns, many scientists believe AI may soon help us understand what animals are saying.
For example, Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is a research project that is using AI to analyze the sounds of sperm whales. Scientists already know that these whales use sequences of clicks, called codas, to identify each other, and that groups of whales even have their own dialects.
The CETI researchers have trained a machine language program on a database of whale sounds, and they are now trying to match the codas the AI has identified with whale behavior. They believe they will be able to translate the language of sperm whales as soon as 2026.
Some people believe that understanding the language of animals will change how we see our relationship with the natural world, and may encourage greater conservation efforts.
But in the meantime, it seems some animals might already want to talk to us!
Humpback whales have been recorded blowing large bubble rings in water during encounters with humans. And a study of these encounters suggests that the whales may be trying to use the bubbles to communicate with us!
