New Artificial Intelligence Could Help Humans Actually Talk To Animals

New advances in artificial intelligence and technology could help people communicate with their pets and other species that call the basement home.

Outside of science, the idea of human-animal interactions has been in popular culture since at least 1967, when Dr. Doolittle was released.

But the idea is no longer just a contrived movie plot; Everything closer to reality.

Scientists have found effective methods to understand animal language, including the complexity of its various sounds and actions.

Although research into animal conversations has been going on for years, in 2010-2017 scientists discovered something important in their AI-based efforts: Languages, both human and animal, can be seen as patterns, and these patterns can be deciphered easily by AI and become technologies. and decoding.

"You're asking artificial intelligence to create a shape that represents language," said Aza Raskin, co-founder and president of the Earth Species Project. “You can use English, you can use Japanese, or you can flip one form over the other and the word dog will be in the same place in both. If we want to translate animal communication, you can translate from character to animal, from animal dialect to animal.

See more: Cats recognize your voice and can tell you when you talk to them

Raskin and the California-based nonprofit Earth Species Project are working to define animal communication based on advances in artificial intelligence and a growing understanding of how, why and when animals behave. Raskin told the News that recent advances in artificial intelligence technology have brought people closer than ever to talking to their furry friends.

"You can type in any voice for three seconds -- my voice is a voice -- and the computer will continue to speak in your voice after those three seconds are up, so it will continue to say what you're saying," Raskin said. "It speaks to your lexicon, your prosody, your personality, to maintain a semantic connection for five, six, seven, eight seconds. Then I realized it means we can do it for the next 12, 36, 48 months with animal communication."

This means that people can directly ask their dogs why they bark or why a cat barks, and pets can theoretically understand more than the basics of human language.

That's because scientists can take these animal acoustics and combine that information about body language, behavior and even things like movement to create a kind of Google Translate for animals.

But as people move closer to potentially discovering species interactions, it's important to note that how and why people use this technology has far-reaching social, ethical, and vital implications, not just in everyday life. After all, people can communicate. Ruskin shared an example of this:

"For some reason, Australian humpback whales are like pop singers, and since humpback whales can sing in ocean tanks and migrate halfway around the world, a song on an Australian beach can go viral for two seasons. Most of the world's population can sing," said Ruskin. "If we create an artificial singing whale, we can say that we have CRISPR coded a culture and a culture of whales and dolphins dating back 34 million years. It's not like we're just going to screw it up or pollute it or create a meme virus."

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