Foster the dolphin looks at a touchscreen communication device
Cat owners should not hold their breath for a fully blown conversation with their pets. The app is dependent on cat owners already knowing what a cat is looking for, as they must correct it if it throws out an incorrect translation. As any cat owner can attest, there is more that goes into an animal’s attempts to communicate than a meow — and each cat sounds quite different.
It doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea to Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the internet, who has spent almost 10 years drumming up the attention of computer scientists to help biologists in their work.
Interspecies I/O, the organisation he helped found, has launched a $1m prize to build a Google Translate-style system that could help us understand the meaning of signals used by other intelligent animals, in the hope we could use it to speak to them. The prize is backed by Jeremy Coller, a British investor who has taken up a crusade to end factory farming.
“It’s been a very slow process because while there are a number of researchers who have received grants to do work with specific species, there hasn’t been for cross-species interaction,” he says.
But the 77-year-old Cerf, responsible for creating the technical standards that underpin the internet as a student in the 1970s, says people are more keen than ever to understand what species are trying to communicate.
“There is some speculation that if we actually understood the semantics of other species utterances or signals, than we might be able to transduce that into a signal that another species could understand and in that case the internet, and machine learning tools, might have a role to play other than sending signals to each other.”
Cerf and his wife have had more time to watch the local animals, such as the neighbour’s dogs or a nearby squirrel family, thanks to pandemic-induced isolation. But the long-time animal lover, who spent time with Koko, the famous signing gorilla, hopes companies like Google will invest in what he sees as the next frontier of civilisation.
Kanzi the gorilla uses a touchscreen device during a spatial memory task
Credit: Dr. Francine Dolins of the University of Michigan- Dearborn
“It speaks to the evolution of brains,” he says. “Understanding the cognitive capacity of different species is a valuable perspective on the evolution of intelligence. We already know that humans communicate with non-human species all the time like dogs, parrots and cats, for example. And while some people might say it is not intelligence, I dispute that.”
Animal communication studies have advanced from the perceptions scrawled in notebooks by Jane Goodall to computer-guided analysis and technologists are rushing to help rescue analogue research from obscurity. Dr Roger Payne, the biologist behind the bestselling nature album Songs of The Humpback Whales, is working to upload his canon with the help of Mark Graham, the founder of internet archive The Wayback Machine.
Technology not only helps record and store data, it can also affect research. Scientists working in animal behaviour now need a quantitative background in order to approach complex topics such as animal cognition, or bird song learning. The physics of sound is present in much animal communication literature, and as result, many scientists have begun learning how to code their own sound analysis programs.
However, hopes that scientists could create some of kind Rosetta Stone between animals and humans could be wide of the mark. The evidence suggests that humans are alone in placing importance on the meaning of our words, or communication.
“Animals don’t have that,” says Dr Arik Kershenbaum, author of Zoologists Guide to the Galaxy and lecturer at Cambridge University. “This is the big mistake that a lot of people make when people think we can translate animal language. They don’t even have a concept of meaning as we have it. There are signals of course but it isn’t a clear-cut sense of here is something that means this.”
Kershenbaum says we may be able to use technology to understand what animals are saying and communicate back with them – it just won’t be on the linguistic level that we are used to. Much of his research looks at deciphering wolf howls, which could be useful for farmers scaring off sheep.
Elizabeth Hobson, an assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati who has been studying parrot song, says our desire to believe we are having intellectual conversations with our pets might lead us to misinterpret patterns from apps like MeowTalk.
“I wonder if they are really just picking up on things that are a lot simpler," she says.
Stress, for example, causes animals to make noise at a higher frequency. An app might pick up on that but it would be hard to tell whether the stress was caused by hunger, or wanting to go outside.
A speech-language pathologist taught her dog how to talk and it's the most wholesome thing on the internet, change my mind (jk you can't)
📹: hunger4words on instagram pic.twitter.com/ivE76QV1Yf
— HITRECORD (@HITRECORD) March 4, 2020
That has not stopped people from trying. Stella, a two-year-old Blue Heeler/Catahoula dog, has become an Instagram star after her owner Christina Hunder, a speech language pathologist from San Diego, began posting videos of her using a soundboard. Hunder claims that Stella knows 29 words and can form phrases by pushing buttons on the board. The videos show Stella pressing buttons for “water” and “want” when her bowl is empty.
Gadgets like this have become common. Dr Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist and marine mammal scientist, has been using an eight-foot underwater touchscreen with dolphin-friendly “apps” and a symbolic keyboard to provide the dolphins with opportunities to interact.
“There is growing optimism as science about animal minds and their capabilities increases,” says Dr Reiss. Her earlier research found that bottlenose dolphins can recognise themselves in the mirror. She also served as the scientific adviser for the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, and is a founding member of Interspecies I/O.
Reiss says that we have come a long way from the groundbreaking research of the 1970s, which spelled the end of a chapter in human civilisation when we believed we were the only sophisticated thinkers.
“If there was something scientists could use to give pet owners a system so they could have a way of showing what they are asking for, it would be incredibly meaningful,” Dr Reiss says.
“It would change our views about other animals because when we minimise the awareness or consciousness of another animal, it can reflect in how they are treated.”
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