Conversations with whales

As we race to translate animal languages, will we listen to what nature has to say?

- David Farrier

Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again.

The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.

Sperm whales communicate in codas - rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti hopes to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.

The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. In April, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data.