Could artificial intelligence enable effective communication between humans and animals? The thought is honestly tantalising, but also freaky.
Regardless, AI tools could make communication with the animal kingdom possible. Scientists have managed to identify that languages, both human and animal, can be represented in the visual form as shapes. AI tools can then decipher these shapes.
Enabling human-animal communication
“You ask the AI to build a shape that represents a language,” Aza Raskin, co-founder and president of Earth Species Project told Newsy.
“You could take English, you could take Japanese, and you could rotate one shape on top of the other, and the word that is dog ends up in the same spot in both. In the animal domain, when we want to translate animal communication that you can then translate, say, from behavior to what the animals are saying, from what the animals are saying to another dialect of another animal.”
Currently, Earth Species Project, a non-profit, is assessing ways to decipher animal communication based on achievements made in the domain of AI.
Raskin told Newsy that by training AI tools with human voice, the software is able to continue the conversation for seconds even when the human has stopped feeding its voice to the system. They wish to extend this to animal communication.
It means that, in theory, humans then should be soon able to ask their cats and dogs why they’re barking and meowing respectively. Pets could understand human words too, then!
A species’ behaviour, body language, and even travel patterns can help create a translation tool. Even then, such tech will create more avenues of discussions surrounding ethics and implications of such communication.