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Orcas Can Imitate Human Speech

posted by martyb on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:47PM   
from the "Thanks-for-all-the-fish" dept.

acid andy writes:

Orcas, commonly known as killer whales, have been successfully trained to imitate human speech.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers from institutions in Germany, UK, Spain and Chile, describe how they carried out the latest research with Wikie, a 14-year-old female orca living in an aquarium in France. She had previously been trained to copy actions performed by another orca when given a human gesture.

After first brushing up Wikie's grasp of the "copy" command, she was trained to parrot three familiar orca sounds made by her three-year old calf Moana.

Wikie was then additionally exposed to five orca sounds she had never heard before, including noises resembling a creaking door and the blowing a raspberry.

Finally, Wikie was exposed to a human making three of the orca sounds, as well as six human sounds, including "hello", "Amy", "ah ha", "one, two" and "bye bye".

The embedded clip of the audio is pretty interesting. We've all heard birds imitating sounds but the article makes a point that only a fraction of animals have the neural and vocal apparatus to do this.

How long until your next call to customer service gets outsourced to these cetaceans?

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Original Submission

• Other animals also Other animals also (Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:49PM (1 child)

  by requerdanos (5997) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:49PM (#631123) Journal

  What's this sandpaper feel like?

  "Ruff!"

  What's that on top of that house?

  "Woof!" *

  Who fed you this morning, him or her?

  "rrrrrrrrr" *

  What's this on the tree here?

  "Bark! Bark!"

  Good boy.

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  * Allowing for English being a second language for a creature who is additionally of a different species than most English speakers, the odd pronunciations of "roof" and "her" are not unexpected.

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• Question to a ''talking'' dog (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:06PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:06PM (#631203)

  Human: Who is the greatest baseball player of all time?
  Dog: Ruth. Ruth.[1]
  [long pause]
  Dog: Uhh, Joe DiMaggio?

  [1] Babe Ruth was the white Josh Gibson.
  If it hadn't been for segregation, the record books would look very different.

  -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  Parent