🐶 Lost in Translation: Will AI soon help us talk to animals?

Many animals and birds communicate with each other. Digital bioacoustics and generative AI are capable of capturing, classifying, and analyzing animal sounds. Machine learning can also generate the voices of animals and birds.

🙊 What has already been "translated"?

The Earth Species Project team created AI to separate overlapping animal sounds — such as monkey calls — into individual tracks and filter background noise.

🐳 In the CETI project, zoologists are recording the sounds of sperm whales off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Sperm whales gather in small family groups near the water surface and communicate using Morse-like "codes," each clan having its own "dialect." Having processed 20% of the recordings using AI, the scientists found that the model could predict the remaining 80% of the sperm whale "code".

🐱 Researchers at the University of Lincoln use AI to understand cat expressions. They identified that cats have 276 facial expressions around other cats, which are not the same as the ones they show to humans.

🐱 Researchers from Tel Aviv University used an AI voice-recognition program to analyze 15,000 bat calls. They found that these animals have different communication styles, for example, mothers use a "baby language" with cubs.

🐷 Scientists from Copenhagen managed similarly to "translate" the language of pigs and separate their sounds into happy and displeased.

What are the prospects?

✅ An animal language translator can help us learn about the animals’ moods, health, behavior, and even what they want to "tell" people.

✅ Decoding animal vocalizations will help in studying the evolution of communication skills in humans and the conservation and welfare of endangered species.

➡️ Audio article in Financial Times

Do you need an interpreter from the animal language?

❤️ — yes, of course
🙊 — no, it's obvious

@hiaimediaen