CIO Insider

CIOInsider India Magazine

Separator

Can Humans Really Talk to Animals through Artificial Intelligence?

Separator

Biomimicry has become quite common worldwide, and scientists widely use it in their research. Rewinding a few years, in the 1970s, Koko, a baby gorilla, got widely recognized worldwide for her mastery of sign language. Even though different species tried to communicate, they could not completely grasp what humans were saying, so they started to use symbolic concepts that are not real. Presently, scientists are observing and interpreting a wide range of organisms, including plants, trying to cut sensors and artificial intelligence technology.

Humans Try to Communicate with Animals?
According to the reports, if we were paying attention to the environment of another organism, we wouldn't anticipate a honeybee to speak human language, but we would become quite curious about the exquisite vibrational and positional language of honeybees. It is perceptive to nuances like the polarization of sunlight that our bodies cannot even begin to relay. And that is where science is at present. The field of digital bioacoustics, which is rapidly emerging and yielding fascinating insights on communication across the tree of life, asks whether these creatures can communicate complex information to one another.

And the researchers say that this is a more biocentric approach or, at the very least, less anthropocentric. How do technologies allow us to do it?

What Sort of Technology Enables These Breakthroughs?
Digital recorders that are extremely compact, lightweight, and portable similar to tiny microphones, are used in digital bioacoustics and are being installed by researchers everywhere from the Arctic to the Amazon. The backs of turtles or whales can be equipped with these microphones. On top of the tallest peak, deep inside the ocean, or affixed to birds. Additionally, they can continually capture sound, round-the-clock, without interruption in far-flung locations that are difficult for scientists to access, even in the dark, and without disrupting by putting human observers in an ecosystem. Because of the data influx caused by this instrumentation, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important. This is because the same natural language processing algorithms that we use to great success in applications like Google Translate can also be used to identify patterns in nonhuman communication. Because of the data influx caused by this instrumentation, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important. This is because the same natural language processing algorithms that we use to great success in applications like Google Translate can also be used to identify patterns in nonhuman communication.

What are Communication Patterns?
Over the course of 2.5 months, 12 Egyptian fruit bats were studied, and the researchers recorded their vocalizations. Researchers used a voice recognition program to examine the noises. An algorithm linked specific sounds to social activities depicted in movies, like a conflict between two bats over food. The majority of the bat noises could then be categorized, thanks to the study. The researchers concluded that bats use a much more complex language than was previously believed as a result. Bats have distinct names or sound that they use to communicate with one another, showing that they can tell one gender from another. Bat mothers speak to their offspring in a mother-like language. However, mother bats communicate to their young at a lower pitch than human mothers do, which causes newborns to babble at first before learning to use specific words or referential cues as they get older. Therefore, bats practice vocal learning.

How are Researchers Talking to Bees?
Researchers say bee communication is vibrational and positional as it communicates through waggle dance. Both body gestures and sounds are important when honey bees talk to one another. Because computer vision and natural language processing can be coupled, computers can now follow this, especially deep learning algorithms. These algorithms have now been refined to the point where they can follow individual bees and determine the possible effects of a particular bee's communication on other bees. The ability to translate honeybee language results from that. We discovered that they emit particular signals. These signals have amusing names, too; they quack, according to researchers. A whooping danger signal and a hush or "halt" signal are present. They have piping, begging, and shaking signals, all of which control both group and individual behavior.

The evolution of digital bioacoustics parallels that of the microscope. Van Leeuwenhoek discovered the microbiological world through microscopes, which was the impetus for numerous other discoveries

The researcher's next move was to incorporate this knowledge into a robot named RoboBee. They eventually developed a bee that could enter the hive and would essentially transmit directives that the honeybees would execute after seven or eight prototypes. They comply when the other bees can hear Landgraf's honeybee robot telling them to halt. It can also perform a more complex task, such as performing the well-known waggle dance, which is a pattern of communication used by honeybees to signal to other bees where a supply of nectar is. Creating a nectar source in an area that has never been visited by honeybees from the hive, instructing the robot to alert the bees to its position, and then watching to see if the bees can travel there are all that is required to carry out this experiment. And they actually do. Because this result only happened once, scientists are still determining its cause and how to replicate it. The result is still astounding, though.

Technology Helping to Understand the Natural World?
The evolution of digital bioacoustics parallels that of the microscope. Van Leeuwenhoek discovered the microbiological world through microscopes, which was the impetus for numerous other discoveries. As a result, the microscope gave us a new way to see and understand the world. In this example, digital bioacoustics and AI combine to produce a planetary-scale hearing aid that enables us to listen with our prosthetically enhanced ears and imaginations. In addition to the incredible noises that nonhumans create, this is progressively helping us reassess the alleged barrier between humans and nonhumans and our relationship with other species.



Current Issue
Trust Is At The Center of BFSI Transformation