On the surface, it may not appear that Dr Dolittle and artificial intelligence (AI) have much in common. One belongs in 1900s children's literature, while the other is firmly rooted in the 21st century. One is a physician turned vet who can talk to animals, and the other a computerized technology that cannot. AI has already given us the ability to bark instructions at robots like Siri and Alexa – could its potential be extended to the animal kingdom? Could it help us decipher some of the mysteries of the natural world and maybe one day allow us to "talk" to animals? There are certainly some who think so.

Disney's 2019 remake of its 1994 classic "The Lion King" was a box-office success, grossing more than one and a half billion dollars. But it was also, in some ways, a failed experiment. The film's photo-realistic, computer-generated animals spoke with the rich, complex voices of actors such as Donald Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor--and many viewers found it hard to reconcile the complex intonations of those voices with the feline gazes on the screen. In giving such persuasively nonhuman animals human personalities and thoughts, the film created a kind of cognitive dissonance. It had been easier to imagine the interiority of the stylized beasts in the original film.

Sure, dolphins use sonar, whiz through the ocean at incredible speeds, and battle sharks. Last week, a study published in Russia's St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics claimed to have recorded two dolphins doing just that. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, exchanged a series of vocal pulses that resembled "a conversation between two people," wrote the study's author, Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station. What's more, Yana and Yasha were exceedingly polite, listening to one another at turns without interrupting. "As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language," Ryabov wrote.