Whenever I see dolphins swimming together, I wonder what they are saying to each other.
Dolphins are very social animals. They whistle, click and make many other sounds while they travel, hunt and play. Scientists have studied these sounds for a long time, but we still understand very little about what they actually mean.
AI may be starting to change that.
Researchers are now using AI to find patterns in animal sounds that would be extremely difficult for people to notice on their own. Google, together with the Wild Dolphin Project and researchers at Georgia Tech, created an AI model called DolphinGemma. It has learned from recordings of wild dolphins collected over many years and can recognize patterns in their sounds and predict what sounds might come next.
This does not mean we can suddenly translate dolphin into English. We are still far from having a conversation with a dolphin. But it is an interesting beginning.
AI is good at looking through enormous amounts of information and finding patterns. This is how it learns patterns in human language. Maybe some of the same technology can help us discover structure in the sounds of dolphins, whales, birds and other animals.
What I find most interesting is what could happen if we eventually understand even a small part of what animals are communicating.
We usually study animals from our point of view. We count them, track where they travel and observe how they behave. But what if one day they could tell us something about the world they experience?
Maybe we could better understand how ocean noise affects dolphins. We might learn when their food is disappearing or when something in their environment is changing. We might even discover that animals notice things about nature that humans have completely missed.
When people talk about AI, we usually talk about machines becoming more intelligent.
But perhaps AI can also help us recognize how much intelligence already exists around us.
There are millions of species sharing this planet with us, and we understand the language of only one. I like to imagine that one of the most exciting uses of AI may not be teaching computers to talk like humans.
It may be teaching humans how to listen.
Daniel Kim, March 2025