Based in California, the Earth Species Project (ESP) believes that AI and machine learning will soon help us decipher animal communication by picking up on subtle animal cues.
- According to researchers from the ESP, animal communication is more complex than human communication. The same noise in the same tonality can carry different meanings.
- While the project's final goal is to learn how animals communicate, it can also help conservation efforts, like teaching birds to sing their natural songs.
How to Understand Animals 101: According to the ESP, AI can now generate shapes, geometric structures known as “latent space,” representing entire languages. These can be used to translate languages without dictionaries and examples of translation. The same method can be used to decode animal language through the following steps:
- The most critical step of this process is to go out and collect data. The only way to analyze the overwhelming amount of animal chatter among different species is to have an overwhelming amount of data.
- You will then need to separate specific acoustics from the natural habitat.
- And finally, you’ll need to feed the data into a machine learning algorithm that can build a new language model through bioacoustics classification and labeling.
What is the Earth Species Project?: The ESP is a California-based nonprofit that defines itself as an open-source collaborative nonprofit dedicated to decoding non-human language through the use of AI systems. The team behind the project believes that understanding non-human languages will change humanity’s ecological impact on Earth.
