KarunaNews Story

New research is raising hopes that we may one day be able to talk with animals thanks to artificial intelligence’s ability to spot patterns in huge datasets of animal noises and actions. But it also throws up big questions about what language is, why it is so hard to ascribe to non-human species, and what it will mean if we do finally work out what other animals are saying. The new Coller Dolittle Challenge tasks the scientific community with developing an algorithm to communicate with non-human organisms, or at least understand what they are saying. Laela Sayigh at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, and colleagues won a Coller Dolittle prize for rheir study of some 170 wild bottlenose dolphins living in Sarasota Bay, Florida. Shortlisted teams are studying cuttlefish, nightingales, and marmosets. The challenge, established by Tel Aviv University in Israel and venture capitalist Jeremy Coller’s philanthropic foundation, is also offering a $10 million bounty to the first team to crack the puzzle of interspecies communication.