How AI could help us talk to animals

Why researchers think we're close to getting interspecies chatbots.

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AI researchers and biologists are teaming up to detect patterns in animal communication that are difficult, if not impossible, to observe with the human eye alone. The studies that have come out so far are steps towards what some AI companies see as a larger goal: building large language models to decode animal communication that is beyond the reach of human comprehension.

This video explains how they might do that, using the same tools that gave us text, image and translation tools for human language.

Here is the study about elephant names co-authored by Joyce Poole and Mickey Pardo:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155...

Karen Bakker's book The Sounds of Life is a great read if you want to learn more about how biologists are taking advantage of advancements in sound technology to study animals:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-soun...

We didn't cover it here, but there was an interesting breakthrough using AI to detect more sperm whale codas than ever before:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146...

Here is a link to Yossi Yovel's bat study:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep3...

Here is the macaque monkey study:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...

Earth Species Project can be found here:
https://www.earthspecies.org/

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