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Scientists Are Using AI to Talk To Animals and Plants

  Dog whisperers may be out of a job soon. Scientific American  has reported scientists are using “advanced sensors and artificial intellige...

 Dog whisperers may be out of a job soon.

Scientific American has reported scientists are using “advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.”

The magazine’s report was backed by data from Karen Bakker, the author of How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.

In Bakker’s book she writes about the future of digital bioacoustics which is the field of communicating with animals and plants by using technology such as AI.

Bakker believes interspecies communication is right around the corner if we “combine digital listening—which is opening up vast new worlds of nonhuman sound and decoding that sound with artificial intelligence—with deep listening.” 

 Scientific American broke down the science behind interspecies communication:

Digital bioacoustics relies on very small, portable, lightweight digital recorders, which are like miniature microphones that scientists are installing everywhere from the Arctic to the Amazon. You can put these microphones on the backs of turtles or whales. You can put them deep in the ocean, [put them] on the highest mountaintop, attach them to birds. And they can record sound continuously, 24/7, in remote places where scientists cannot easily reach, even in the dark and without the disruption that comes from introducing human observers in an ecosystem.

That instrumentation creates a data deluge, and that is where artificial intelligence comes in—because the same natural language processing algorithms that we are using to such great effect in tools such as Google Translate can also be used to detect patterns in nonhuman communication.

The WEF seems to be excited about the idea of communicating with animals by using AI and wrote an article about the Earth Species Project which is a non-profit  is developing machine learning ecology to decode animal communications by tracing back patterns to ecology research.

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