Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn't mean the songs convey complex meanings like our sentences do, it hints that whales may learn their songs in a similar way to how human infants start to understand language. Only male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing, and the behaviour is thought to be important for attracting mates. The songs are constantly evolving, with new elements appearing and spreading through the population until the old song is completely replaced with a new one. We're finally realising that many species are "We think it's a little bit like a standardised test, where everybody's got to do the same task but you can make changes and embellishments to show that you're better at the task than everybody else," says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.

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.