When I was in college, my father obtained a pure-bred golden retriever puppy. Sherry was easily the most intelligent animal I had ever come across.
Like all dogs, her emotional intelligence was off the charts. She could associate certain sounds (words) with certain commands and actions, and use the inflection of a human's voice, facial expression, and sounds she could recognize to react.
My dad used to say he was convinced that the way she looked at him, one day she would talk to him.
It was a fanciful notion, of course. Dogs communicate, but not with language. But what about a higher form of cognitive intelligence, like whales or dolphins?
Humans have been scientifically studying how dolphins communicate for more than 40 years. The animals' sophisticated communication skills are undeniable. Clicks, whistles, and "burst pulses" — rapid sequences of clicks that dolphins emit while fighting or in close contact with each other communicate something.
Now, Google has partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the nonprofit Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) to create DolphinGemma, a large language model (LLM) for dolphin vocalizations.
WDP has studied Atlantic spotted dolphins for 40 years and was able to provide massive amounts of acoustic data to aid in the project. Teams at Georgia Tech and Google asked the model to generate "dolphin-like sounds." “Half of it was background noise stuff that you expect from the ocean,” says computer scientist Thad Starner, of Georgia Tech and Google DeepMind.
But Starner was shocked when the rest of the playback sounded exactly like dolphins, including the "burst pulses" that he was never able to recreate any other way.
“When I first heard it played back..., I was dancing around the room,” Starner says. Ordinary computer programs are only as good as the code humans put into them. But LLMs "create instructions for making new sounds independently, based on what they’ve learned from data," explains Scientific American.
The team now wants to project how AI completes vocalization sequences—like “when I’m typing into Google and it’s finishing my sentence,” says WDP founder Denise Herzing. Manually, “it would take some 150 years to go through all the data and try to pull out those patterns.”
Using AI analysis isn’t just quicker. It “could give us the opportunity to see patterns that, from a human perspective, we may not look at,” says Thea Taylor, managing director of the Sussex Dolphin Project, who is not involved in the new project.
If the LLM consistently returns the same answers, it might reveal a pattern. Reviewing WDP’s video data could then show researchers what the dolphins are doing when they make a specific sound: Are they, for example, playing with friends or fighting with a rival?
The team plans to use technology called CHAT (cetacean hearing augmented telemetry). The CHAT includes vocal and visual elements. The researchers use a device strapped to a diver that emits a sound in "dolphin" while showing the object they want to name.
Naturally, there are many scientists who believe it's useless to try to "talk" to dolphins.
“Language is infinitely complex,” says Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist who studies animal communication at Girton College in England. “If you have a separate word for every object in your environment, that’s not a language.”
Kershenbaum compares the project to the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: when the crew of the starship Enterprise tries to communicate with humpback whales, they can simulate whale song but not its meaning. “This is not about translation,” he says.
So we aren’t going to have a what we usually call a “conversation” with dolphins anytime soon. If the animals do appear to recognise complex AI sequences as having meaning, however, “that still gives us a window into their cognitive abilities,” Kershenbaum says.
Other groups, such as the Earth Species Project and the Project CETI (Project Cetacean Translation Initiative), are pursuing similar projects to decipher the vocalizations of crows and sperm whales.
Dolphins and other cetaceans have cognitive abilities far beyond those of most other mammals. They are self-aware, are expert problem solvers, and share many emotional traits with humans.
But "language" is a specific cultural artifact apparently unique to humans. Dolphins will never be able to talk to us about their inner lives. But communicating concepts about our shared place on the planet would enrich both species.
