Anicet Mbida 06:59 am, November 05, 2021
Every morning, Anicet Mbida gives us the very best in terms of innovation.
Today's innovation could remove the mystery of whale song. Technology should soon allow us to understand them.
We are in the process of developing an interpreter, a whale translator.
Not just any whales, sperm whales.
These are animals that communicate primarily with clicks and jacks.
It is assumed that this is used to find food, to prevent dangers or simply to know where their fellows are.
To be sure, a team of researchers has just launched the CETI project, the famous cetacean interpreter.
They will rely on the latest techniques in artificial intelligence, not only to try to understand what they are talking about, but above all to be able to talk to them.
Concretely, how are they going to do it?
They will listen to them, record them and pass all the sounds through the mill of a program that has already analyzed the subtleties of some forty languages.
The objective is to create a sort of dictionary of the sperm whale by cataloging the sounds then the words, before giving an interpretation.
Some, very simple, have already been cataloged.
Like "danger" or "attention".
They should therefore be able, fairly quickly, to decode a word here and there.
And therefore to have a vague idea of what they are talking about.
And could it work with dolphins too?
Yes.
There too, a project is underway.
It is more advanced, because it started four years ago.
It was thus discovered that dolphins had a language structure quite similar to ours.
With words and phrases that we slowly begin to interpret.
We are also interested in the chirping of certain birds or the cries of monkeys.
It's amazing: animals come to understand us with a little learning.
But we, despite all our technology, we are unable to do so.
Who knows ?
That may soon change.