Advances in AI could hold the key to decoding animal communication

Could AI help us unlock the secrets of animal communication? Animal communication has been a longstanding fascination of humans — just take a look at the hype around Jane Goodall’s years spent studying chimps communication, or all the hit movies featuring talking house pets (Garfield, we’re looking at you). But what if we could really decode their vocalizations? As it turns out, 2025 could be the year that we learn what Fido and Lassie are trying to tell us, as artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are brought into the mix, Wired reports.

Advances in tech are offering researchers access to ever-larger pools of vocalization data: Researchers now have access to durable and advanced audio recording technologies — like AudioMoth — that capture a wide range of sounds at relatively low costs, allowing them to leave recorders in the field 24/7 and capture everything from gibbon calls to birdsong. The result? Massive datasets that were once impossible to obtain, store, and manage are now more widely available than ever.

Once these datasets are in hand, researchers can apply deep learning techniques to uncover hidden structures in the vocalizations. The goal is to identify patterns that might resemble human language or represent other forms of communication. However, unlike human language — where meanings and syntax are relatively well-defined — animal vocalizations often lack clear equivalents to words or grammatical structures. AI technologies like large language models (LLMs) and neural networks offer a powerful tool for quickly combing through data in search of these deeper structures.

So why do we care? Decoding animal language offers scientists the opportunity to investigate animals’ self-awareness, with potential implications for how we treat and relate to all animal life, Nature writes. Earlier this year, two studies utilizing AI-based tools found evidence that African elephants and marmoset monkeys give each other distinct names in much the same way humans do — which could indicate that they think of themselves as individuals, just like us.

Research on animal language also helps us understand the social lives of animals — which sometimes is not so different from ours. Research on whale echolocation has already shown surprising parallels between whale life and ours, with researchers discovering that groups of whales — dubbed “clans” — communicate in their own dialects, marking what researcher Shane Gero calls “cultural boundaries” between whale groups.

TL;DR: On balance, new applications of AI technology signal that rapid advances in understanding animal communication could be just around the corner. In addition to scratching our human itch to understand our world, this development could have positive knock-on effects for the animal kingdom — assuming that humans will have more empathy for animals once they realize they have minds of their own.