Will AI help us talk to animals?

Nature is noisy. If you sit on a rock in a forest, on a mountain or in a field, you will commonly hear something chirrup or snuffle about. Even in the concrete city of Berlin, I'm often yelled at by flocks of thuggish sparrows living in bushes or lulled to sleep by nightingales that visit the German capital annually in May.

We know that cows moo with regional accents, monkeys make sounds that are specific to the threats they face, mice sing and crickets scream for sex.

And now new researchsuggests that "clicks" heard in sperm whale vocalizations are like vowels in human speech. It appears that sperm whales communicate with patterns of a-vowels and i-vowels.  

Increasingly, scientists have been using AI tools to study animal vocalizations, especially complex communication systems.

Scientists use AI to study animal communication

There has been a boom in our understanding of animal communication in recent years, and we owe it partly to artificial intelligence (AI).

AI allows researchers to analyze huge amounts of audio data of animal calls in seconds that would take humans decades to sift through.

There are hundreds of AI tools for analyzing vocalizations of different species.

Kevin Coffey, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, US, helped build DeepSqueak, a machine learning tool which decodes rodent chatter.

DeepSqueak picks out rodent calls from raw audio data, compares them to calls of similar characteristics, and gives insights into the animals' behavior.

"Rats use ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs). High pitched 50 kilohertz (kHz) calls have been described as similar to a laugh, but there are many types of these made in different positive situations, like play, courtship, or even during the rush of a drug hit," said Coffey.

Rats also have 22 kHz calls that are used in negative situations, such as when they feel pain or sickness. Coffey uses those frequencies to tell when an experiment is making his lab rats feel bad.

Humans can't hear these calls as they are outside the frequency range that humans can hear, but DeepSqueak and other tools can help us to decode them.

Since its introduction in 2018, DeepSqueak has been used to study rodent social behavior, drug use, autism, and more. It has also been modified for use with many other species, such as dolphins, monkeys, and birds.

Coffey said they used to analyze USV spectrograms by hand but that AI tools allow them to automate the process, so they save time. But it's still up to humans to decide what the vocalizations mean.

"AI and deep-learning tools are not magic. They are not going to suddenly translate all animal sounds into English. The hard work is being done by biologists who need to observe animals in a multitude of situations and connect the calls to behaviors, emotions, etcetera," he said.

Do animals have languages?

Communication is essentially the transmission of information. All animals communicate somehow — by smells, pheromones, behaviors and vocalizations.

But the idea of animal languages is contested — partly because of how humans view language and what it does for us.

Yes, animals do have forms of language, as far as we know. But the dialogues of sperm whales or symbolic communications of monkeys don't come close to the richness of human language.

Language is a particularly advanced toolkit for communication that seems to be unique to humans, said Coffey.

Anthropologists say language is unique to humans because of its ability to create and sustain cultural beliefs, relationships, and identities.

Human language also allows us to express our inner thoughts and feelings for other humans to understand. We think other animals are unable to do that with their vocalizations and actions.

Some theories even suggest that human consciousness, the higher metaphorical version of consciousness, developed alongside our capacity for language. 

"People argue about what exactly defines language and if some elements of animal communication are similar to [human] language. The rodents we study are certainly very social and very communicative. The vocalizations they produce are highly varied and carry different types of information, but I still wouldn't consider them a language," said Coffey.

Beware of anthropomorphizing

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is often credited with having said that his words have meaning, but a parrot's words do not — the idea being that when humans say things, they mean things as well.

We'll park the debate about whether Wittgenstein was right or wrong for just a moment and focus on the idea of meaning. Because some researchers say it is this idea of human meaning that leads scientists and non-scientists to project meanings onto the squeaks and squawks of other animals. 

An example, when scientists in Berlinfound that rats "laughed" when they were tickled, commentators declared that rats had a sense of humor.

Scientists then reacted, arguing that interpreting the high-frequency chirps of the tickled rats as humor, or even laughter, was a matter of humans anthropomorphize animals — that is, our tendency to "humanize" animals or even objects, like robots.

How do we know that the rats found the tickling "funny"? We don't. We can't read the mind of a rat.

But other experts have argued we often underestimate the capabilities of animals. And as a result we are now seeing more and more studies claiming "novel" findings, such as fish feeling pain, intelligent octopuses, or that rats laugh.

So, we may be getting better at studying animals, or simply more willing to accept their human-like complexity.

This will come as no surprise to any pet owner, who will tell you they know exactly when their dog is feeling sad.

 

And many a parrot owner will tell you Wittgenstein was wrong, if you take his words literally. They will say a parrot's calls could mean they are in pain or hungry — to name just two internal states.

Science has evolved since Wittgenstein's writing in the early 20th century.

But Coffey said some level of anthropomorphizing is good because it helps people connect to the animal world.

"Mice make structured songs with many syllables. They are much more complicated when males are calling to females vs. when males are talking alone. I always thought that was cute. But good that academics remain cautious about communication vs. language. We are probably never going to tell rats and dolphins about e-sports or inflation," said Coffey.

Why listen to animals?

Understanding animal communication goes far beyond human curiosity.

Coffey believes AI will benefit animals we meet every day.

"For me personally I would like to improve the lives of laboratory animals and improve the rate of translatable discoveries in neuroscience. Understanding rodent communication in the lab is one piece of that puzzle," said Coffey.

Other scientists and organizations use AI to monitor biodiversity of animals in the wild.

Researchers at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, used microphones to record rain forest soundscapes and analyzed the cacophony of animal vocalizations, including insects and birds, to track biodiversity restoration.

The Earth Species Project (ESP) is also using AI to monitor biodiversity. The ESP has a bold belief on their website that "an understanding of non-human languages will transform our relationship with the rest of nature." 

Their ambition is to use AI to deepen our understanding of animal communication, helping us to connect with other living species and to protect them.

Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany