Do you remember a movie called Dr. Doolittle which involved the main character being able to talk with the animals (many years later there was a remake which we won't speak of, though)? It's always been a fun dream to be able to speak with the animals, and thanks to AI that may becoming closer to reality!

Researchers have developed DolphinGemma, the first large language model (LLM) for understanding dolphin language. It could help us translate what these incredible creatures are saying, potentially much faster than we ever could with manual approaches used over several decades.

“The goal would be to one day speak Dolphin,” says Dr. Denise Herzing. Her research organization, The Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), exclusively studies a specific pod of free-ranging Atlantic spotted dolphins who reside off the coast of the Bahamas.

She's been collecting and organizing dolphin sounds for the last 40 years, and has been working with Dr. Thad Starner, a research scientist from Google DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of the tech giant.

With their powers combined, they've trained an AI model on a vast library of dolphin sounds; it can also expand to accommodate more data, and be fine tuned to more accurately representing what those sounds might mean. "... feeding dolphin sounds into an AI model like dolphin Gemma will give us a really good look at if there are patterns subtleties that humans can't pick out," Herzing noted.

Herzing's organization will deploy DolphinGemma this field season, and this new model should accelerate the team's efforts to study and document the behavior of Atlantic spotted dolphins. Google says it will make DolphinGemma an open model around the middle of the year, meaning that it will be more widely available to researchers elsewhere in the world. The company says it should be possible to adapt it for use with other cetacean species, like bottlenose or spinner dolphins, with a bit of fine-tuning.

"If dolphins have language, then they probably also have culture," Starner noted. "You're going to understand what priorities they have, what do they talk about?" That could give us a whole new perspective on how intelligent species in the animal kingdom communicate and how their societies operate.