Artificial intelligence is helping scientists decode animal languages

In the Pixar movie Up, a cartoon dog called Dug sports a magical collar of sorts that can translate his barks and whines into fluent human speech. Elsewhere in the real world, very well-trained dogs can be taught to press buttons that produce human speech for simple commands like "outside," "walk," and "play." Humans have always been fascinated by the potential to communicate with the animals that they share the world with, and recently, machine learning, with its ever more advanced capabilities for parsing human speech, has presented itself as a hopeful route to animal translation. An article in the New York Times this week documented major efforts from five groups of researchers that looked at using machine-learning algorithms to analyze the calls of rodents, lemurs, whales, chickens, pigs, bats, cats, and more. Typically, artificial intelligence systems learn through training with labeled data (which can be supplied by the internet, or resources like e-books).