Google Is Training a New A.I. Model to Decode Dolphin Chatter—and Potentially Talk Back The company says its new model, called DolphinGemma, will be made open source this summer. Researchers are also trying to train dolphins to mimic made-up names for certain objects A newly developed A.I. model is based on 40 years of vocalizations from a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins. Google Dolphins are clever communicators. The animals use complex clicks, squawks and whistles to call out to each other, fight and attract a mate. Now, Google says it is developing a large language model (LLM) that can make better sense of those vocalizations—and, maybe, allow humans to talk back. Over the last 40 years, researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) have collected audio and video of a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) in the Bahamas. The new artificial intelligence model, called DolphinGemma, is trained on that database. It listens to the dolphins’ vocalizations, identifies patterns and predicts what comes next, just as LLMs do with human language. Using A.I. “could give us the opportunity to see patterns that, from a human perspective, we may not look at,” says Thea Taylor, who manages the Sussex Dolphin Project in England and is not involved with Google’s work, to Melissa Hobson at Scientific American. Relying on the LLM can also speed up the data analysis process, which would take a human more than 100 years by hand. DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication Watch on Researchers with Google, the WDP and Georgia Tech are also working on a device called CHAT, or Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry. The wearable technology will allow researchers to generate dolphin-like sounds made up by A.I. to refer to specific items that dolphins enjoy, like seagrass or sargassum. A pair of divers wearing the CHAT device will swim alongside a dolphin, “asking for” an object with the made-up sound and passing it back and forth. Then, if a dolphin mimics the sound that corresponds to seagrass, for example, a researcher will reward them by handing it over. “By demonstrating the system between humans, researchers hope the naturally curious dolphins will learn to mimic the whistles to request these items,” notes a statement from Google. “Eventually, as more of the dolphins’ natural sounds are understood, they can also be added to the system.” Taylor tells Scientific American that the researchers will need to make sure they aren’t unintentionally training the dolphins. Even if the animals repeat the sound, she says, “we have to think whether that’s actually an understanding of language—or whether it’s the same as teaching a dog to sit because they get a reward.” Exploring Wild Dolphin Communication with C.H.A.T. (Cetacean Hearing Augmented Telemetry) Watch on In separate efforts, A.I. is also being used to decode other animals’ vocalizations. Scientists with Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), for instance, are using artificial intelligence to understand sperm whales. The Earth Species Project aims to use its model, NatureLM, to process sounds from animals across various species. DeepSqueak, meanwhile, is a software that analyzes rodent squeaks to determine when the creatures are stressed. Still, whether animal communication amounts to true language remains a matter of debate. Another team of scientists concluded this month that bonobo calls share a key trait with human speech. But Simon Townsend, senior author of that study, said “language is specific to humans,” to NBC News’ Evan Bush. In 2023, Simon Kirby, a cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, told the New York Times’ Sonia Shah “Language is infinitely complex,” says Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at Girton College in England who is not involved in Google’s project, to Scientific American. “If you have a separate word for every object in your environment, that’s not a language.” Dolphins have variations in their vocalizations, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to a difference in meaning. “It’s not immediately clear that dolphins have words,” adds Kershenbaum. Google says it will release DolphinGemma as an open source model this summer, which will allow researchers to use it with other dolphin species. “We hope to give researchers worldwide the tools to mine their own acoustic datasets, accelerate the search for patterns and collectively deepen our understanding of these intelligent marine mammals,” writes the company in the statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.