Have you ever imagined being able to communicate with your pet at home and have them understand everything you say?
True or all that sounds too good to be true from what Dr. Doolittle* said, scientists are beginning to use artificial intelligence* to help them communicate with animals.
AI will allow humans to use technology to observe and understand the sounds and signals that animals communicate, allowing them to speak to animals.
Professor Karen Bakker, author of the book “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plant,” told Scientific American magazine that AI is already in the mix between humans and bats and bees. He has been helping to communicate with and said this is a possibility. It’s about changing what we know about nature and non-human relationships.
Professor Bakker said an AI algorithm* helped decipher* recordings of conversations between animals. Communicating in their language, she said, could be superior to previous attempts to teach apes and other creatures to use human sign language.
Bakker explained how researcher Yossi Yobel used recordings and AI to understand bats.
“Bats argue over food. They actually gender* when they communicate with each other. They have individual names, or ‘signature* calls,'” she said.
“Mother bats speak to their babies in words equivalent to ‘motheries’*.
“However, since human mothers raise the pitch of their voice when speaking to their babies, whereas mother bats lower their pitch, babies *babbling* as they grow up learn to ‘speak’ specific words and reference signals.” * provokes a response. So bats are doing vocal* learning.
She said this is a great example of how patterns in animals can be revealed using sensors and microphones that the human ear can never hear.
AI makes this possible because computers can be trained to hear like bats.
In the case of the bee, the computer combines hearing the bee’s body movements with vision to understand what the bee is saying.
“When bees ‘talk’ to each other, it’s not just the sound that matters, it’s the body movements,” Bakker says.
“Nowadays, computers can … use computer vision combined with natural language processing, so they can follow suit.”
He said researchers know how bees say things like “quiet” and “stop.”
Researcher Tim Landgraf has created a robotic bee that can communicate with other bees when they enter the hive and want something to stop or fly away. .
*This article was originally published in The Sun and has been republished with permission.
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Glossary
- Dr. Dolittle: A character in a series of children’s books and films who can talk to animals
- artificial intelligence: When Computers Can Think and Learn
- algorithm: A series of step-by-step instructions explaining how to perform a task
- Decoding: Translate into a language you understand
- Distinction: distinguishing things by seeing the difference
- sign: something peculiar to a person or thing
- Native language: the language mother speaks to her baby
- leads to: to make something happen by speaking
- Stream: make meaningless sounds
- reference: When a child starts speaking in one word, such as mother or dog, to identify objects
- vocal: sounds made using your voice
additional reading
Is my pet happy, angry, scared or sad?
Lifelike robots chat with humans
AI Reveals Spider Web Sounds
easy quiz
1. How can artificial intelligence make animal language easier to understand?
2. Which two animals did scientists study first?
3. How are animal patterns revealed?
4. What are two things that combine to understand bees?
5. What is another less successful way humans have tried to communicate with animals?
listen to this story
classroom activities
1. Talk to animals
If you could talk to your favorite animal, which animal would you choose? Write five questions to ask the animal. Then write the answer you think the animal will give. Use your investigative skills to find information for answers.
time: It takes about 30 minutes to complete this activity.
Curriculum Links: English, Science.
2. Expansion
What are the advantages and disadvantages of humans understanding animal communication? Write a sentence that answers this question.
time: You have 30 minutes to complete this activity.
Curriculum Links: English, Science.
VCOP activities
1. Level up with openers
Create a list of all openers in the article. He picks three repeated words and sees if he replaces them with other words or shuffles the order of the sentence to bring the new opening to the fore.
Don’t forget to read the sentence again to see if it still makes sense and if it actually sounds good.
