At Wired, Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, an expert on animal language, reports that the Collier–Doolittle prize — cash prizes up to half a million dollars — are offered for cracking the code of animal language using machine learning and AI. He predicts a bright future:

Massive datasets are now coming online, as recorders can be left in the field, listening to the calls of gibbons in the jungle or birds in the forest, 24/7, across long periods of time. There were occasions when such massive datasets were impossible to manage manually. Now, new automatic detection algorithms based on convolutional neural networks can race through thousands of hours of recordings, picking out the animal sounds and clustering them into different types, according to their natural acoustic characteristics.

Once those large animal datasets are available, new analytical algorithms become a possibility, such as using deep neural networks to find hidden structure in sequences of animal vocalizations, which may be analogous to the meaningful structure in human language.

However, the fundamental question that remains unclear is, what exactly are we hoping to do with these animal sounds? Some organizations, such as Interspecies.io, set its goal quite clearly as, “to transduce signals from one species into coherent signals for another.” In other words, to translate animal communication into human language. Yet most scientists agree that non-human animals do not have an actual language of their own—at least not in the way that we humans have language.

“The Race to Translate Animal Sounds Into Human Language,” December 22, 2024

Kershenbaum, author of Why Animals Talk (Penguin 2024) seems aware of the problem: If animal languages were like human languages, animals would have civilizations like human ones but they don’t.

Thus when we have finally decoded what the dog means when he woofs and wails and grabs the leash and brings it, we may well have discovered that he means to say: “I really need to go out and pee… I really need to go out and pee… I really need to go out and pee.”

Does a science prize await this discovery? At bottom, the researchers are probably hoping for more. But perhaps they should not overlook the possibility that that is really all there is to it. 😉