Google wants to unravel the secret of dolphins communication

From medical research to meeting applications, artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new perspectives pushing the limits of what was once possible in terms of technical and scientific progress. This is also the case in marine biology, a field of research in which AI could allow researchers to interact with dolphins.

• On April 14, on the occasion of World Dauphins Day, Google unveiled the Dolphingemma project, an AI model designed to decode the communication of dolphins by analyzing their clicks, their whistles and their sound pulses ¹.
• In collaboration with the researchers of the Wild Dolphin Project, a research organization that has collected and lists since 1985 noise of spotted dolphins of the Atlantic, Google seeks to unravel the secret of the communication of these mammals in order to allow humans to understand them.

To hear the whistle of a spotted Dauphin from the Atlantic, click here:

• Dolphingemma is only in its infancy, but would already show encouraging signs. This summer, Dolphingemma should be shared as an open model in order to be tested by researchers working on other cetaceans.

Dolphingemma is not the first project using artificial intelligence to try to unravel the mystery of animal communication. The Earth Species Project (ESP), an NGO seeking to “develop a peak AI to amplify the voice of nature”, announced in December Building Naturalm, an audio linguistic model based on AI which would be able to identify animal species, their approximate age and if the sounds indicate a distress or a game ².

• Probably partly for fear of being accused of anthropomorphism, researchers – notably Western – have taken out in recent decades of projects helping to blur the boundaries between humans and animals ³.
• Thanks to an AI designed to measure by the alphabet subsidiary Deepmind, the researchers of the Wild Dolphin Project are now able to execute Dolphingemma directly from their smartphones, on the ground.
• Google’s Pixel phone, taking on the Dolphingemma Model (400 million parameters), is at the heart of the Chat system developed by Georgia Tech.
• This can analyze in real time the sounds produced by dolphins thanks to the audio tokenization SoundStream, while facilitating a bidirectional interaction between researchers and dolphins.

Many studies indicate that dolphins use sounds to communicate information, and even to cooperate in order to accomplish tasks ⁴. No empirical evidence however makes it possible to assert that they have a “language” made up of distinct and identifiable units which would allow humans to communicate with cetaceans.