Humans May Be Shockingly Close to Decoding the Language of Animals

• Scientists are now using artificial intelligence to attempt decoding animal language.
• The ultimate goal is to achieve two-way communication between animals and humans.
• We know about chatbots and ChatGPT, but scientists want to use computer computation power to decode animal languages.

A nonprofit called Earth Species Project (ESP) has one goal: decode non-human communication. The organization believes the nonstop advancements in artificial intelligence can help seal the deal—fast.

“We believe that an understanding of non-human languages will transform our relationship with the rest of nature,” the organization’s website says. Of course, not only does Earth Species Project want to decode animal languages—it also wants to start communicating with the animals.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has given Earth Species Project and its CEO Katie Zacarian a platform. “We are on the cusp of applying the advances we are seeing in the development of AI for human language to animal communication,” Zacarian says, according to the WEF. “With this progress, we anticipate that we are moving rapidly toward a world in which two-way communication with another species is likely.”

The nonprofit believes it can develop machine learning systems to decode animal communication by identifying patterns in animal language and then analyze that data to understand the chatter. Along with recognizing communication patterns, scientists need to also link back the communication to behavior in order to have any hope of figuring out what the patterns could potentially mean, says Karen Bakker, a University of British Columbia professor, via the WEF.

That’s the focus of ESP, which is tracking animals—including birds, dolphins, primates, elephants, and honeybees—to match their communication with their behavior. And ESP believes the first breakthrough could come from marine mammals, since the bulk of their communication is done acoustically.

Of course, this concept expands significantly if and when we can start having conversations with animals and letting them make decisions for us, Doctor Dolittle-style.

“Understanding what animals say is the first step to giving other species on the planet ‘a voice’ in conversations on our environment,” says Kay Firth-Butterfield, the WEF’s head of AI and machine learning. “For example, should whales be asked to dive out of the way of boats when this fundamentally changes their feeding or should boats change course?”

The answer may be here sooner than we think.