I have not seen this BBC News video covered on this subreddit but it piqued my curiosity so I wanted to share. I have known about projects attempting to decode animal communications such as Project CETI which focuses on applying advanced machine learning to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. But the translator shown in the video blew my mind, it is already able to grasp the topics which Bats communicate about such as: food, distinguishing between genders and, surprisingly, unique “signature calls” or names the bats have.
The study in question, led by Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University, monitored nearly two dozen Egyptian fruit bats for two and a half months and recorded their vocalisations. They then adapted a voice-recognition program to analyse 15,000 samples of the sounds, and the algorithm correlated specific sounds with specific social interactions captured via videos—such as when two bats fought over food. Using this framework, the researchers were able to classify the majority of bats' sounds.
I wonder how many years it'll take to decode the speech patterns of most household animals, do you think this is a good idea? Would you like to understand your dog or cat better? Let's discuss!
GPT 4 summary of the video:
- AI is being leveraged to understand and decode animal communication, with a specific focus on bat vocalisations, at a research facility close to the busiest highway in Israel.
- The unique open colony at Tel Aviv University allows scientists to monitor the bats round the clock and record their vocalisations with high-quality acoustics, providing a continuous stream of data.
- To teach AI to differentiate between various bat sounds, scientists spend days analysing hours of audio-visual recordings, a task that involves significant technical challenges and large databases for annotations.
- The result is a 'translator' that can process sequences of bat vocalisations, displaying the time signal of the vocalisations and subsequently decoding the context of the interaction, for instance, whether the bats are communicating about food.
- Although the idea of a 'Doolittle machine' that allows humans to communicate with animals may seem far-fetched, the advances made through AI are steering us closer to this possibility.
Interesting article on the topic: Scientific American
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