Google, in collaboration with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project, has announced DolphinGemma, an AI model designed to analyze and generate dolphin vocalizations. With about 400 million parameters, the model is compact enough to run on Google Pixel phones used in ocean fieldwork, allowing researchers to process dolphin sounds in real-time.
DolphinGemma builds on Google's lightweight Gemma model family, optimized for on-device use. It was trained on an extensive, labeled dataset collected over four decades by the Wild Dolphin Project — the longest-running underwater dolphin research initiative. These audio and video records capture generations of Atlantic spotted dolphins in their natural habitat, complete with behavioral context and individual dolphin identities.
The goal is ambitious: to detect the structure and potential meaning in dolphin sounds — including signature whistles used between mothers and calves, or the aggressive "squawks" exchanged during disputes. DolphinGemma functions like a language model for dolphins, predicting likely vocalizations based on prior sequences, helping researchers uncover patterns and hidden rules in their communication.
and here's the dolphingemma site
Will this LLM generate AI spam for dolphins? And is there any way we can know what it's saying?
Additional discussion on the matter at The Guardian: We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Processed by jelizondo
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 12, @11:44AM (20 children)
If it will do dolphin,
will it do cat or dog?
We probably have a lot more people-animal interactions as people know their companion animals quite well and will likely do a lot of research on their own.
It will be very interesting to generate cat and dog vocalization as we do for human speech.
"Chat" GPT for kitty?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Funny) by EEMac on Thursday June 12, @01:45PM
CatGPT.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 12, @01:57PM (9 children)
The problems with relating to cats / dogs / dolphin are not very different from relating to people from radically different cultures. Examples:
My graduate school advisor was from Azerbaijan or some such place around there... there were topics of discussion we could never quite understand each other about, no matter how clearly and slowly we spoke the words.
Perhaps more concretely, I was in former East Germany in the summer of 1990. I could converse with the locals about many things, but when it came to topics of finance... we just couldn't connect, our backgrounds were too different to have meaningful discussion.
There was something written a while ago about trying to talk with seagulls, but finding the conversation rather boring because it was all about winds, weather and small fish.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, @02:28PM (4 children)
When you ask the AI what a dog or cat is trying to tell you, you'd better hope the answer isn't something like "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", "Shaka, when the walls fell", or especially "Zinda, his face black, his eyes red".
I'm not sure if the AI reporting back "Karno in the forest with Mira" would be a good thing or not. Depends on whether or not you're concerned about pet happiness or their health.
Another possibility is for the dog or cat to say "Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossroads, at Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray". Then when the human doesn't react, the next line might be "Chenza at court, the court of silence" or "Kiteo, his eyes closed".
Let's hope those aren't example of what our AI universal translator determines that cats and dogs are saying.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday June 12, @02:50PM
The issue with that is it's an incomplete translation. A complete translation would say the meaning of the phrases, not just the words.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday June 12, @04:45PM (1 child)
From Google Gemini:
We're getting there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, @05:43PM
Sokath, his eyes uncovered. [fandom.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 12, @05:37PM
Dogs and cats generally do not have a long continuity of social storytelling across a large group that could develop such metaphors.
However, inside jokes are everywhere - you remember that time that Ethanol Fueled totally spun out over the laser comment by MDC? Yeah, like that.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday June 12, @04:41PM (3 children)
I bet the ones you talked to would have a lot of information the NOAA [noaa.gov]/NWS [weather.gov] would love to have, and those are just the US organizations. Beats how banal the conversation [youtu.be] *could* be.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 12, @05:40PM (2 children)
There's definitely value in learning what the other life forms on earth are saying, from birds to trees to fungi in the forest... it's just not generally what you'd expect to hear at the pub on a Saturday night.
There's also value in learning how to talk back, a great deal of value if your talk can lead to predictable actions on the listeners' parts.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday June 12, @06:59PM (1 child)
When you put it that way, I bet the (possibly emotionally) smarter animals would start coordinating their behavior [rifters.com] (search for "break down" in that page) as they vocalize and act, then watch our responses to them, then lather, rinse, repeat. When that happens, we become an intelligent, interactive part of their environment that they can engage with up to the limit of their capabilities and interest [scientificamerican.com].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 12, @08:13PM
I suspect that many animals (and plants) are aware of a great many things in the environment that we, generally and even scientifically, are not, but... for the most part, they're probably not very loquacious inter-species communicators either.
If we could be a "translator bridge" among significant groups, that could lead to some very interesting results. What if birds could be persuaded to eat pests on crops but not too much of the crops themselves?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, @02:21PM (4 children)
A lot of cat and dog communication is nonverbal.
Cats don't really meow much except around humans. It's a learned behavior to get the attention of humans. There are other types of vocalizations like hissing and yowling, but each of those vocalizations means one and pretty much only one thing. Again, purring is pretty simple to understand. Cats use a lot of nonverbal communication when interacting with their own species.
Dogs do have some nuance in how they bark or why they howl, but it's still a fairly simplistic form of communication rather than an attempt to have a conversation. A lot of their communication is still nonverbal, so I'm not sure how much there is to decode in vocalizations.
I think people generally have a better understanding of dog communication than they do with cats. Perhaps that's because dogs have been around humans and had frequent interactions with us for much longer, evolving to better interact with us. Cats have been domesticated for millennia, but they haven't generally been kept as pets for a lot of that time, instead being used to keep rodents at bay. They use body language such as facial expressions and how they hold their tail, and humans don't necessarily decipher these things well. If anything, a bit of computer vision and AI to help humans understand the nonverbal cues of felines would probably be much more useful than trying to decode meows, hisses, and yowls. If cat owners had a better understanding of what their cats were trying to communicate, it might help improve the human-cat relationship and provide a better experience for both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 12, @10:50PM
I think my neighbor's dog has been training from TV.
He's developing a bark that sounds very much like that TV pitchman that sells pocket hose. He also chews his rubber squeaky toy so that it emits a similar sound.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 13, @03:42AM (1 child)
It's not learned. Even before they can see, hungry kittens meow very loudly at whatever they think is their mother. "Are you my mommy?" at high decibels (which tends to decline with maturity). If you remain "mommy" in their lives, they'll keep "talking" to you.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, @07:18AM
https://cats.com/facts-about-feral-cats [cats.com]:
A meow is how a cat communicates it wants or needs something. Yes, kittens do meow to get their mother's attention. However, as adults, cats generally don't meow to each other very much. They do, however, meow at humans because it lets them communicate their needs to us. It is a learned behavior because when cats are around humans, they learn how to use meows to get our attention and tell us they want us to do something. That might be petting them, feeding them, or even just opening a closed door so a cat can access rooms that it considers to be parts of its territory.
(Score: 2) by jb on Saturday June 14, @08:39AM
Indeed. It's an old English sport in which the players kick each other in the shins.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday June 12, @03:07PM (2 children)
If it will do dolphin, then I also suspect that will do pig [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday June 12, @03:08PM (1 child)
Grrr sorry [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday June 12, @06:20PM
That'll do, Pig...
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Friday June 13, @07:38PM
NON VOCAL. they use gestures heavily and not much sound. plus cats are not social and likely communicate less.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Thursday June 12, @12:36PM
... finally, the visionaries of SeaQuest DSV are seeing their prediction become reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV [wikipedia.org]