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We’re Closer Than Ever to Talking to Animals

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Advancements in technology, particularly machine learning, are revolutionizing our ability to understand and potentially communicate with animals, moving the dream of interspecies dialogue from science fiction to a tangible possibility.

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What are you going to say

to your favorite animal

when you can communicate with it?

This is one of the questions

that researchers all over

the world are tackling

in the fascinating world of animal

communication.

Today,

With advancing technology,

we're closer than ever before

to decoding the language

of some of the world's

most fascinating species.

This is how machine learning

is opening the window

into the world of animal

communication.

Hi, I’m Danielle Dufault

and you're watching Animalogic.

Today we're exploring

the near magical science

of animal language.

Talking to animals,

and more importantly, understanding

their reply is something

that is fascinated us

for pretty much ever.

Just think of all the ancient books

and religions that have stories

about people talking to animals

like geese, snakes and ravens.

But it's only in the past few years

that we've developed the tools

to listen to animals

in meaningful ways.

Today, with machine learning,

unlocking new methods

of interpreting and analyzing

animal language, the dream of becoming

real life Doctor Doolittles

seems to be not a matter of if,

but when,

and that when is

getting closer by the day.

There are ongoing

experiments to understand

the language of whales, dolphins,

dogs, prairie dogs,

elephants, and even cuttlefish.

And one day

we might be able to have casual chats

with some of those animals.

Questions like that, that really keep

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Of course,

these are not the first studies

on animal communication.

From signing gorillas

to talking parrots

and button pushing puppies.

We have thrown everything at the wall

and nothing has stuck.

But in science, just as in life,

you often learn more from failure

than from success.

So let's take a quick look back

at some of the most interesting ways

we've tried and failed

to communicate

with our fellow Earthlings.

Some of the earliest studies

were done on our closest relatives,

the great apes.

This was the 1960s,

and instead of trying to understand

how animals

talk to each other,

scientists tried to teach them

how to speak like us.

This was the case

with Viki the Chimp.

Researchers tried to teach her English

by raising her as a human

and giving her speech therapy.

But after three years,

they realized that chimpanzees,

quite simply, can't make

the noises we make when we speak.

It's kind of like us

trying to communicate with dolphins

by squeaking like them.

Wait, has anyone tried that?

If there's any dolphins in the

audience, I just want to say:

Since chatting with apes

was out of the question,

the strategy changed to teaching them

sign language.

Washoe,

Nim Chimpsky,

and Koko the Gorilla

became simian celebrities

for learning signs.

Koko was said to know

over 1000 signs,

but the signs didn't have grammar.

And there were questions

about how much she knew

and how much her trainers

projected into her body

language and signs.

There's been other experiments

with different degrees of success,

but in general, we can say

that apes can learn signs,

but they don't create signs.

They don't have an organized way

of combining signs

to say different things,

and they almost never ask questions.

So it's always a one sided

level of communication.

Talk about a bad date.

The next subject would have to be

an animal that communicated vocally

and in more complex ways than apes.

Dolphins.

In 1964, scientists

partially flooded a house

with ocean water.

The idea was for researchers

to move in with a dolphin

and teach them English.

But what started out as a wacky

sitcom premise

quickly turned into a horror story.

When Peter the Dolphin

became aroused and disruptive

during English class,

the scientist would handle it

to relieve the dolphin

and get him to cooperate.

And in the end, after

the well deserved media backlash,

very little science was done

and the dolphin didn't

learn English.

But a few years later,

one of the most important studies

in animal communication was done

also on dolphins.

You don't hear about it much

because it isn't as saucy

as the dolphin house.

But thanks to this study

in the field of animal communication,

the foundations got laid

and thankfully

dolphins didn't.

The researcher

was Louis Herman.

He wanted to speak to dolphins

in a language

that they would understand.

Instead of English words,

he created electric sounds

the dolphins could easily tell apart.

Then he taught the dolphins

with the sounds meant.

The genius of it was

keeping it simple.

Instead of focusing on how many words

a dolphin could learn,

he focused on what it could do

with a small vocabulary

of about 15 words.

What he found

is that dolphins have syntax.

The order of words makes a difference.

For example, human-ball-fetch

means something different than

fetch-ball-human.

It seems super simple to us,

but it's hard as hell for animals

to understand

those studies on dolphins

sparked interest in learning

about animal communication

on their own terms.

Hundreds of studies

have been done since then.

Researchers learned over the decades

that prairie dogs calls

convey specific information,

like the size and color of a predator.

Vervet monkeys have different

sounds to alert their friends

of different predators too.

Elephants and whales use low frequency

signals to communicate

with other members of their group

over vast distances.

And bees

shake their booty in particular ways

to tell each other about the direction

and distance of flowers.

So we know

animals communicate.

The question now is

can we learn to communicate with them?

Could I have told prairie dogs

that I was a friend?

It all sounds like a

massive cacophony to us,

but there's a lot of

communication happening.

We just can't understand it

because we don't have the hardware

or the software to do it.

So here's where new evolving

technologies come in.

We can now use

neural networks to go through

massive amounts of data

and find patterns.

It sounds good in theory,

but in practice

we have the huge issue

that we still don't

have that much data.

So there are new organizations

trying to compile that data

and run it through

specialized programs.

One of these groups

is Project CETI,

a scientific

and conservation organization

of over 50 scientists

all over the world.

Their goal is to understand

the rapid fire bursts of clicks

that sperm whales use to communicate.

These bursts are called codas

and seem to make whole sentences

and even regional accents.

So for the past few years,

they've been collecting thousands

of hours of sperm whale audio

to get some insights

into their language.

It's such an ambitious project

that we ask the team leading

those efforts to tell us how it works.

These are the scientists

who might figure out

how to talk to whales.

So we couldn't be more excited

to have them on the show.

One of the most ambitious

initiatives is by Project Ceti,

who's trying to teach us

how to talk to whales.

Hi, I'm Gasper Begus.

I'm a linguistics

lead at Project Ceti,

and I'm an associate professor

at UC Berkeley.

I'm David Gruber.

I'm a marine biologist

and a distinguished professor

of biology

at the City University of New York.

So as a linguist,

I like to study human languages.

But, in the past couple of

years, linguistics

has been really opening up,

and we realize

we have so many tools to offer.

And in my opinion,

sperm whales are for many reasons,

one of the best species

to start looking in.

They're incredibly smart.

They have very complex

social structures,

social relationships,

like we have grandmas

with swimming with other whales.

They are

taking care of each other's offsprings

and they exchange in dialogs.

These clicks

that on the surface

look really alien.

But if you look into them deeply,

you can see

a lot of linguistic traits.

And, that's that's how I was,

trying to open up

my linguistics side

from humans to non-humans.

And it's has been really exciting.

This isn't a project

you can do

by sticking a microphone in the water

and then running it

through an advanced machine

learning system.

Every step of the process involves

a great deal of problem

solving and collaboration.

When the project started

putting together

interdisciplinary team,

this was really important

because like,

I don't have all the answers,

but I noticed that I needed someone

to make the cameras

and someone to make the robots

and someone to do the analysis.

So for this project,

I think one of the key things

was working with linguists.

I'm working with people like Gasper,

and there have been

very few projects

where marine biologists

and linguists were working together

up until this project.

So this has been like a real joy and,

learning experience for both of us.

The first step of their work

was collecting all the data

with as much detail as possible,

and often in multiple ways.

It's great to record

the codas of a whale,

but it's even better

if at the same time

you have the footage of what it's

doing when making the calls

or heart sensors

to see what the whale is feeling

when making those calls.

But that leaves you

with a massive amount of data

that's impossible for human brains

to analyze.

As a human, you have a lot of biases.

And when you're faced

with something like sperm whales.

It's really fascinating

because you have to step out of

those biases and really try

to find things

that are meaningful

to this other species,

which is,

you know, has very different lives.

And so you have to get out

of your human biases.

I n a sense we used advanced machine

learning to help us that

machines are just a tool here.

Machine learning

is just a tool in that approach,

where you can use this other tool

to help you understand, to help you

gain insights.

Advanced machine

learning is also better at seeing

patterns in different scales of time.

It's kind of strange

to think about it,

but different animals might experience

the passage of time

differently than we do.

It's like if a different species

was studying us,

but we sounded like this to them.

So by looking

more deeply

into the timing of the codas,

the team is finding extra details

that show a rich language.

Zoom in those clicks.

You see way richer structure

than you know

when we started doing that.

And I think that's really important

because we're showing

that this creature, this,

this species

not only has complex lives

and complex social relationships

and are really interesting,

they also have communication system

that can carry a ton of information.

And we don't know yet exactly where

that information is.

But there is a potential

that I've never seen it

basically in any other species.

And I've worked with other animals.

Before.

That's fascinating.

And one of the best things

is that it's only one of the many

ongoing projects,

one of the ones closest to my heart

is Zoolingua’s prairie dog project.

Con Slobodchikoff,

from Northern

Arizona University, and his team

recorded the vocalizations of Gunnison

prairie dogs.

They observed that

they made different alarm calls

for different animals.

So he ran the recordings

through speech recognition software

to see what the calls meant.

What they found

was that on top of specific

calls for their main predators

hawks, coyotes

and humans,

they also had descriptive adjectives

so they could communicate information

like big black hawk

when there was a recurrent predator,

like a particularly crafty coyote.

A word would emerge.

I wonder what they called me

when I was trying to film them.

One of the cool things

about this technology is that

it can be applied

to different species.

Zoolingua, for example,

is applying their findings

from prairie dogs to lab dogs.

Dogs are our closest friends.

They evolved from wolves

to be our companions.

They can eat our food,

and a big part of their success

is their ability

to communicate with us.

But most of this communication happens

through body language.

So their mission is to figure out

the combination of barks

and other sounds

with the dog

facial expressions and actions,

and figure out what they mean.

This makes sense

because few animals communicate

with their version of words.

If you've ever had a dog,

you know that a look can often

tell you more than 100 barks.

Imagine being able

to talk to your pup.

I'd love to talk to my cat, nebs.

She's an extremely talkative cat

and she makes a whole range of sounds

that all mean

something pretty different.

So maybe this would help me

be able to talk in turn with her.

Other than meowing back

and forth forever.

Hey, cuttie.

Meowing at

me from the top of the stairs.

Yeah.

You like being up top,

don't you?

Programs like the Earth Species Project

are trying to make

that happen.

Earth Species Project is a company

trying to decode animal language.

They created a program called

Nature LM audio and trained it

with over 25 million

animal sounds.

The program is still in development,

but the early results

have been positive.

And as of 2025,

it's being tested on a wide

range of animals like crows,

finches and belugas.

Back to cetaceans.

Dolphins are always one

of the main subjects of study

when it comes to animal communication

and intelligence.

And there's a lot of amazing research

about how they communicate

with each other and how it can help us

in conservation.

Just like whales, dolphins

communicate vocally

and to understand

what they're saying to each other.

We need a lot of data.

While dolphins,

as you can

imagine, are hard to follow.

But some researchers

are using the latest technology

to get their clicks on tape

and figure out their meaning.

We asked one of the researchers

who's trying to get a bit closer

to understanding dolphins,

how they're doing it.

My name is Laela Sayigh

and I work at the Woods Hole

Oceanographic Institution

in Massachusetts in the USA.

We can record them

with these contact hydrophones

that we actually put

right on their melon.

And then we also put digital

recording tags on their back

before we release them.

These are all noninvasive

invasive technologies.

And the tags,

if they're bothering them,

they can just jump up a few times

and knock them off if they want to.

And so those

but both of those reporting

methods

give us some really high quality

data from known individual dolphins,

which is kind of the holy grail

for studying dolphin communication.

Those technologies

are always evolving.

The next generation of recorders

has sensors that can detect depth

and record the dolphins movements,

so we can see what types of whistles

they do

when they're doing

specific activities.

Dolphins have signature whistles,

which are kind of like their names.

When a dolphin does

its signature call.

It's basically announcing

flipper is here!

But they also have shared

whistles that they use

to communicate with each other.

We call those calls

non signature whistles.

The issue is that to

start understanding them

you have to first know

all the signature whistles

in an area

to be able to tell them apart.

So what have we learned

so far about the

non signature whistles.

So there's two different types

that we have done

some playback experiments with.

We decided to focus on these two

that we have kind of

the most data for.

And so we've done

some experiments

that are suggestive

at least of one of these types

maybe being some kind of alarm

call or danger type signal,

because we've see most animals

avoiding the stimulus

when they hear it.

And then we have another one

that's a little bit more complicated

because that one,

it's not playing back.

That one is a little trickier.

We've seen animals

making that type of whistle

in a situation where they seem

to be kind of surprised.

So they are hearing

something unexpected

and they make that whistle.

So we have kind of speculated

that it's sort of like a what is that,

what am I hearing kind of thing?

We jokingly referred to it

as the WTF whistle

and on the boat.

That's right.

Dolphins seem to have a whistle

for: RUUUN!

or I guess, SWIIM!

And another one for: what the heck?

And the more we researched

them, the more types of calls

we will find.

And finally,

we would never forget

about the elephants.

These majestic beauties

communicate with very low rumblings

well below what we can hear.

To us it's just vibration.

But to elephants it's

a whole conversation.

The Elephant Listening Project

compiled over

300,000 hours of

elephant rumbles,

which are low frequency calls

that our ears can't hear.

One of their researchers,

Doctor Michael Pardo,

wanted to figure out

if elephants had names.

They knew

elephants were more reactive.

After hearing some specific rumbles,

which they hypothesized

was their name.

Based on that,

they compiled close to 500 calls

from over 100 elephants.

They knew who had made the call

and who seemed to be the intended

recipient of the call.

Then they ran the

rumblings through a machine

learning model.

It successfully predicted

who was being called about

25% of the time.

Finally, they played the calls

they had confirmed to be an elephants

name.

And the elephants who were called

responded strongly and locally

to hearing those calls.

So basically it went like this.

Victor!

And Victor the elephant replied,

What?

You can learn about these elephants

by checking out Doctor Pardo's

YouTube channel,

linked in the description.

Okay.

Using technology to understand animals

looks very promising and exciting.

I'm sure there will be amazing

discoveries within the next few years.

But what about the animals

that don't communicate vocally?

Can we use technology to understand

animal body language and visual cues?

I mean, take us for example.

We communicate with our bodies

all the time.

Cuttlefish are one of the last animals

you would think about

when making a list of chatty animals.

But if you look closely,

you can see them signaling each other

and changing colors.

We think they're communicate,

but we don't know what.

It's still such a poorly

understood system

that we went straight

to the leading expert

in cuttlefish sign language

to ask how their solving

this problem.

So I'm Sophie Cohen-Bodenas

Currently I'm

a researcher in sensory

neuroscience at Washington

University in Saint Louis.

So what is really fascinating

about cuttlefish is that

not only do they use this ability

of doing dynamic skin patterning

for a camouflaging,

but they also do it for communicating,

which means that it's versatile.

So sometimes they will do like

a white patterning to

blender in the skin,

but also sometimes they will do black

spots on the skin to communicate.

Doctor Cohen-Bodenas

noticed that the cuttlefish

were moving their arms

in particular ways.

They weren't random moves.

They seem to be saying something.

So she started recording them

and eventually

classified for recurrent movements.

The next part of the research

was seeing

what happened

when you played the signals back

to the cuttlefish.

We wanted to see

like putting them like,

right in front of the screen,

and we wanted to see

how would they would react

when we were presented

in what was really fascinating,

that they were very curious about it.

They would come by themselves

in front of the screen

and they would display the signs.

And what was also very interesting

is that not only

they would display the sign

like as mimicking, like, for example,

they see up the food up or something

like that, which would have been very interesting

because we would have said, oh,

it might be mimicking signals,

something, but it was a bit different

because when they would see the sign,

respond with a different type of sign.

But the ocean is dark,

and marine animals often

have to rely on their sense of touch

or mechanoreception

instead of their eyes.

So what would happen

if two cuttlefish

wanted to communicate at night,

or in murky water,

or simply when they couldn't

see each other?

So what we did

is that we put the hydrophone,

which is just like a microphone.

But for underwater to record the trace

emitted by the wave,

we could do spectrogram.

And then we did

the playback experiment,

which means that we playback test

that trace to the cuttlefish.

And why this experiment is interesting

is that it canceled the visual aspect

because you just display

like the vibration in the water

without them seeing one another.

And so it was really interesting

also for us because,

the cuttlefish

indeed got really interesting.

They would tend to come

to this hydrophone

to display the sign.

We interpret this first result

as a preliminary proof

that they could perceive it also via,

mechanoreception.

All of this data proves

that communication is happening,

but we don't know what the signs mean.

This is where technology comes in.

It's really, like,

complicated for a human to say

exactly in which context?

Behavioral context.

Which sign mean which sign.

So the idea is to have

a colony of cuttlefish,

and let's enable them

to display the signs

along with the coloring patterns

in many different behavioral contexts.

Collect a lot of data

and then have an algorithm

that will find the structure for us.

In order to start to,

dream.

We'd have to have an algorithm

that is going to say,

okay, so

two black spots plus orange.

plus raw, is most often correlated,

I say just as an example, eating.

And zebra

pattern plus

a crown plus white square

is going more often

being related to aversive display.

And this is something that for

a human is very hard to decipher.

But a powerful algorithm would be able

to possibly do this for us.

Super rad.

It's like getting an insight

into the minds of aliens,

which cuttlefish,

despite some internet

rumors, are 100% not.

Although they kind of look like

they could be from Pandora.

It's hard not to be optimistic

about all of this research,

but before we start thinking

about full conversations

with the animals in our fish bowls,

there's still a lot of work

to be done.

I think there is a misconception

that people think you just throw

AI at any animal,

and out comes some translation.

I think because it's working

so well on humans.

People are able to take that leap

in their head.

But now that we're really deep

in this project,

we see that is not the case.

We can't just take ChatGPT

and throw it at whales,

and out comes a translation.

And it's, it's a significant climb

that we're undertaking undertaking.

In all of these cases,

Machine learning is more of a tool

than a universal translator,

and trained professionals are still

the most important

part of the equation.

I think that it's really important

to actually

watch the animals and document

sort of how they respond to sounds

and how they're using sounds.

I think that just

putting a lot of sounds

into some kind of AI

and having it discern

whether they're sort of patterns

or things like that, that could be valuable

in potentially

helping to generate hypotheses

that we could test.

And yes, through a combination,

we will learn a lot

about animal communication

with the help

of advanced machine learning.

But there's something we always have

to keep in mind.

We have to do it with

the welfare of the animals in mind.

I think the key thing

is, is always keeping the whale center

and asking that question is like,

is this study

is this finding in service of

of the whale?

And you just keeping that

at our core heart of the project?

If we do that

and start to learn more about

the inner lives of whales,

dolphins, cuttlefish

and other animals,

we might have to change

not only how we see ourselves

in relation to the natural world,

but also how we apply our laws.

If we're finding

all these things about

animals and languages, in a sense,

this last frontier

that the legal system has

has used as kind of a barrier

to keep rights on the humans.

So if we're finding a species

that can communicate with codas

that are so informative,

so it can be so powerful, right?

Can transmit so much information.

I think we need to pause

and ask ourselves, well, you know,

what does that mean

for the legal system?

In other words, there might be a point

where our understanding of animals

becomes so deep

that we might give them some rights

that are currently seen

as exclusively human rights.

But if the animals are

so smart and their consciousness

is so deep and meaningful,

why wouldn't they deserve

to have some rights?

As technology advances,

it's a question

we might need to answer

sooner than we think.

You know, I'm a linguist.

I started with linguistics,

with old languages.

I studied really all languages.

And those languages allow

you time travel because, you know,

you have access to these people

who lived 3000 years ago.

And listening to the whales is like

traveling in different

intelligences, right?

You have this amazing species.

You can imagine their lives.

You know, they when they sleep,

they flow like vertical heads.

And you're just, like,

imagining,

this beautiful intelligence.

And you realize,

you know, maybe

our position as humanity

is, is not as high

as we used to think.

I think it keeps you grounded.

It keeps you closer to it,

and it can help you really reimagine,

maybe what

the position of humanity is.

So, yes, technology can help us

learn about animal communication

and support conservation projects,

but we have to keep the welfare

of animals first

and not prioritize profits.

We also have to make sure

that we listen to them

and really try to understand them,

not just hear what

we want them to say.

Many of the things animals

will say will require us

to adjust our behavior massively,

from our shopping habits

to our eating preferences,

to even where we choose to live.

So here's hoping that

when animals talk to us,

their calls don't fall on deaf ears.

So what should we talk about next?

Please let me know in the comments

and don't forget to subscribe

for new episodes every week.

Thanks for watching.

See ya and take care.

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YouTube 字幕：We’re Closer Than Ever to Talking to Animals