Artificial intelligence is helping us talk to animals (yes, really)

Each time any of us uses a tool, such as Gmail, where there's a powerful agent to help correct our spellings, and suggest sentence endings, there's an AI machine in the background, steadily getting better and better at understanding language. Sentence structures are parsed, word choices understood, idioms recognised. That exact capability could, in 2020, grant the ability to speak with other large animals. Maybe even faster than brain-computer interfaces will take the stage. Our AI-enhanced abilities to decode languages have reached a point where they could start to parse languages not spoken by anyone alive.