by The growing field of “digital bioacoustics” is helping us understand animals like never before.
Advanced sensors and computer artificial intelligence (AI) can help us communicate with animals. Now, scientists are starting to “talk” to species like bats and bees.
Artificial intelligence “understands” animal language
The editors of Scientific American spoke to Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia (Canada) and a researcher at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (US) to discuss how researchers are using this new technology to understand animal communication.
Now, they say, the field of “digital bioacoustics” has been developed to understand how animals communicate. For example, instead of trying to teach birds to speak English, researchers deciphered what they were talking to each other in bird calls.
They use portable sensors, such as small audio recorders, and place them in trees, on top of mountains, and even on the backs of whales and birds.
This sensor records sound 24/7 with a large amount of data. The AI computer then applies a natural language processing algorithm — like the one used by Google Translate — to detect patterns in the recordings and begin decoding the conversations between the animals.
Interesting discovery: Mother bats communicate with babies in their own language
A researcher named Yossi Yovel recorded audio and video of nearly 20 bats in Egypt over two and a half months.
His team tuned a speech-recognition program to analyze 15,000 sounds, and the algorithm then compared specific sounds to certain social interactions in the video, such as scrambling for food or adopting a sleeping position.
Through this study, combined with other related research, they found that bats have complex communication capabilities.
Specifically, when they communicate with each other, they have a kind of calling to each other, like calling their own names, and even discriminate against them. In addition, each bat has a “native” sound. They often argue about food and sleeping positions. They also know how to maintain social distance when sick.
The most interesting thing is that mother bats communicate with their babies in their native language. They have their own hug language. This causes the baby bats to babble again and can help them learn specific words or sounds.
“We can’t talk to bats, but a computer with electronic sensors and speakers can,” Professor Cullen said.
Robotic bees ‘direct’ real bees
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Clearly, animals communicate in a much more complex way than we previously thought.
Bee researcher Tim Landgraf says bees use not only sounds but also body movements to talk, which they call a “waggle dance”.
Landgraf and his team used dance combined with natural language processing. As with the bat study, the AI computer analyzed the images and decoded the bee’s sounds and wobbles. This helps the team track each bee and predict stories between them.
Landgraf’s team then encoded the information they collected into a robotic bee.
After 7-8 prototypes, they had a robot that could actually go into the hive, and then it would give commands like signals, and the bees would obey.
