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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?
(Score: 2) by IndigoFreak on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:05PM (2 children)
No one else is commenting on this. But they don't sound anything like human words. I wouldn't really expect them to either.
But honestly, saying bye-bye and the orca making 2 fart noises after it is not imitation in any meaningful sense. Congratulations, you make a sound and the whale makes a sound. This is very disappointing and i fail to see how it is news worthy or any leap forward scientifically.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:17PM
It isn't that they can accurately portray human speech, but they are making a very good approximation. It shows higher vocal intelligence than we thought they were capable of. I really wouldn't call the orca speech "fart noises" as I can hear the inflections. If I didn't know what words they were trying to say I would have a hard time guessing, but play clips of a few words and it becomes obvious they are trying to replicate human speech.
Killjoy
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:23PM
The fart noise was the "raspberry" sound they were taught previously. Note they at least do it twice when responding to a two word phrase and some of the repeat attempts do sound a lot more accurate than that.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?