There are other hurdles. Many animals communicate not just through sound but through visual cues, touch, pheromones, or a combination of signals, some of which might be difficult for us to perceive. And without a multispecies Rosetta stone, it’s hard to know if translations are accurate. 

The progress

Over the past 50 years, a growing arsenal of devices has made it easier to observe the sophisticated ways animals communicate. Hydrophones at the bottom of the ocean can capture humpback whale song, and tiny wearable “biologgers” can record a bat’s every squeak. 

In the last decade, advances in AI have leveled up our ability to make sense of it all. The technology can detect different calls, distinguish which sounds belong to which animal, and spot patterns. Researchers at the Earth Species Project (ESP), a nonprofit founded in 2018 to decode animal communication, recently used machine learning to detect vocalizations of carrion crows and determine which bird made which call. 

They suspect that more advanced AI could translate critters’ chatter. Large language models like Claude and ChatGPT excel at finding relationships between words, explains Sara Keen, one of ESP’s behavioral ecologists. ESP hopes its own NatureLM—trained on human speech, music, and animal sounds—will be able to interpret the vocalizations of a variety of species. 

That promise, however, is still theoretical. Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University, worries that these models will put too much emphasis on acoustic similarities and make mistakes—like lumping together similar sounds that have different meanings. 

As for a two-way convo? It’s not clear when—or whether—that will happen. Still, “a lot of animals have an evolutionary structure that is similar enough that we should be able to understand what they’re saying,” Slobodchikoff says. 

Progress meter ………… 4

Researchers have amassed heaps of data on animal communication, but they’re still trying to figure out how to decipher it all.