We Could Soon Be Speaking Dolphin, Thanks to AI

Advances in artificial intelligence have led hackers to invent voices to mock billionaires on street corners and ushered in new uses for existing drugs. And soon, they could have us speaking dolphin. That's the hope of Google and the Wild Dolphin Project, anyway. As part of its work on generative AI, Google has collaborated with the WDP, a research group that's been tracking a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins off the coast of the Bahamas since 1985. The group has long been interested in dolphin vocalizations and social interactions, and has decades worth of audio and video recordings of the species. With Google's help, researchers fed that data into an AI model that can look for patterns and subtleties unnoticed by humans, per Ars Technica.

Dubbed DolphinGemma, it's "the first large language model (LLM) for understanding dolphin language," which "could help us translate what these incredible creatures are saying, potentially much faster than we ever could with manual approaches used over several decades," per New Atlas. "The goal would be to one day speak dolphin," says WDP founder and research director Dr. Denise Herzing, though she admits it's not yet clear if there is a dolphin language. Researchers know dolphins communicate in whistles, clicks, and squawks, and believe some whistles are used similar to human names. And they've been attempting two-way communication, using underwater computers equipped with hydrophones to detect sound and speakers to play artificial vocalizations.

But this is a difficult process when humans barely understand dolphin sounds. The LLM, built on the same technology that powers Google's Gemini models and chatbot, can predict what sounds might follow dolphin vocalizations in the same way AI can predict terms in Google search, Google says. Ideally, it will come up with sounds a dolphin would understand faster than humans would. WDP plans to use the model during the upcoming field season. Google plans to release it in coming months, allowing more researchers to test it out. This "could give us a whole new perspective on how intelligent species in the animal kingdom communicate and how their societies operate," says Google DeepMind research scientist Dr. Thad Starner, per New Atlas. (More artificial intelligence stories.)