AI Could Help Humans ‘Talk’ to Birds

Résumé détaillé

Scientists are using AI to decode zebra finch calls, potentially paving the way for humans to communicate with birds.

Scientists are using AI to help research and decode the calls of zebra finches, a small, highly social songbird, native to Australia, that uses a range of calls to communicate with one another. This research could potentially help establish two-way communication between humans and animals.

Julie Elie, an associate project scientist in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent more than a decade studying how zebra finches communicate. Her work has helped to identify roughly 11 types of calls used by the birds to communicate information to each other, including hunger, danger, and social conflict, as well as to establish contact and bond with other birds.

Experiments showed that zebra finches appear to distinguish their 11 calls based on what they mean as well as how they sound. The birds were more likely to confuse calls with similar meanings than calls that simply sounded alike.

The results suggest that zebra finches understand what different calls mean, rather than simply recognizing how they sound.

"As long as call-types have clearly different meanings for the birds, they are very well distinguished even if their acoustics are quite similar," Elie told UC Berkeley News. She said the pattern of mistakes provided evidence that the birds have a "mental representation of the meaning" of their calls.

These findings could provide some of the key building blocks needed for eventual two-way communication.

If researchers can reliably establish what particular calls mean to birds, technology, such as AI, could be used to recognize those signals. Ultimately, it could produce calls that the birds will understand—potentially enabling two-way conversations between humans and animals.

Although this breakthrough hasn’t happened just yet, the research has been recognized for its potential to help humans communicate with animals.

Elie and her team combined more than a decade of behavioral observations with machine learning and AI to put the…

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