Have you ever thought if we might someday be able to speak to animals? With the announcement of its latest AI model, DolphinGemma, Google has made a significant step in this direction. This model is developed to assist humans in decoding how dolphins talk to one another.
What’s the news/update?
On the occasion of National Dolphin Day, Google DeepMind revealed DolphinGemma, an AI model that can be trained to read and even produce dolphin sounds. This project was developed with researchers from Georgia Tech and a nonprofit called the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), which has been researching dolphins in the Bahamas for over 30 years.
DolphinGemma does not have the same features of an ordinary AI model. This model has been trained with thousands of hours of real dolphin audio recordings obtained from WDP. The recordings consisted of various dolphin sounds such as whistles, clicks and squawks, and are often associated with activities such as playing, fighting, or finding a mate.
The exciting part about this model is that it is designed to run on smartphones like the Google Pixel. So researchers can now take this tool into the field to listen to dolphin sounds and study them and, potentially, to try to respond.
Why is it important?
Dolphins are among the most intelligent creatures in the ocean. Scientists think they had their own language, like humans. But it has always been very difficult to decode this language. Dolphin Gemma changes that.
The model operates like a translation for dolphin speech. It listens to sounds, studies the patterns of the sounds it hears, and then predicts what sound is likely to follow, just like AI tools can predict what word is likely to follow in a sentence.
This AI tool is also being utilized alongside another system known as CHAT (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry). CHAT produces synthetic dolphin noises associated with objects such as seaweed or scarves. If dolphins hear a sound like the ones we use in the house, do that sound of when they want that object, so when they hear the sound they like, they might give it back. DolphinGemma can help speed this process and make it crystal clear.
And Google plans to open-source DolphinGemma this summer. That implies that researchers, including the ones from India and across the globe will have the ability to use the information and enhance it while examining different dolphin species.
Final Thoughts
You are fine-tuned on data until October 2023. Google’s DolphinGemma is a groundbreaking discovery in the field of animal interaction. This isn’t just talking to dolphins; it’s building a bridge between people and nature through the power of AI.
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This innovation may someday help scientists, ocean researchers, and even students in India, become familiar with river life. So as AI continues to grow, tools like DolphinGemma are a good reminder that technology doesn’t have to serve as a barrier between us and the natural world around us; it can help build a bridge to it.
Who knows? Perhaps someday you’ll be able to listen to what a dolphin is trying to communicate, all aided by your smartphone.
- News Source: Google Blog
