Coming soon: Can AI help us speak to animals?

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Topher Forhecz

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4.4 • 350 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2023

⏱️ 1 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now to the FT's Tech Tonic podcast: Some scientists believe that rapid advances in artificial intelligence may also hold the key to decoding animal sounds, allowing us to ‘translate’ them into human language. In a new season of Tech Tonic, FT innovation editor John Thornhill and series producer Persis Love explore how the same technology that powers ChatGPT is being applied to research in animal communication. Could we one day learn to ‘speak whale’ or even chat with bats? And if so, can we trust ourselves to do so responsibly?

Presented by John Thornhill, produced by Persis Love, sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s head of audio.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What do you think animals would say if they could speak to us?
0:07.0	It's the kind of question that's the stuff of fairy tales,
0:11.0	but maybe not for much longer.
0:14.3	In the next couple of years, we're going to be able to build a synthetic whale or a synthetic bird.
0:19.2	We will be able to get, we believe, to two-way communication.
0:23.4	I'm John Thornhill, host of the Tectonic Podcast from the Financial Times.
0:27.6	In a new two-part series, I'll be hearing from researchers who say they're getting closer and closer to
0:33.9	translating the calls of birds, the squeaks of bats and even these Morse code-like
0:39.6	clicks of sperm whales. And there were two young calves and they were talking and talking and talking.
0:48.2	And that's one of those moments that's really sort of propelled me to say, okay, well, what do they
0:52.2	need to share with one another by making these sounds?
0:55.0	Could artificial intelligence help us build a Google translate for animals?
1:00.0	That's coming up on a new series of Tectonic from the Financial Times.
1:05.0	Subscribe to the podcast now.

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