Artificial intelligence helps decode sounds of the animal kingdom

Artificial intelligence is helping us understand the language of animals. The technology can analyze hours of animal audio in a fraction of the time the same work would take for a human. "If you're manually trying to isolate these calls from audio files, it takes a really long time," said Kevin Coffey, a professor at the University of Washington. Coffey is also one of the creators of DeepSqueak, an A.I. program designed to pick up on high-pitched rat calls that human ears often miss. "In rats, these calls are often related to positive or negative effect," Coffey said.