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Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Maria Margaronis.

Now we have the ability to listen to everything in the ocean.

What's going on in that animal's head?

Is there a kind of kind of cindred spirit out there that can maybe understand what I understand?

The mission is quite simple.

The mission is to listen to and to translate the voices of sperm whales.

This is Digital Doolittle's Talking to the Animals.

I'm not necessarily putting them into human language so that we can understand them.

Technological progress has opened our ears in new ways to the voices of other animals.

So we could understand their world deeper.

And some people believe that the growing power of AI could help us to communicate with them

directly. But there are doubters.

If you read what's going on in the press, everything right now is being filtered through this lens of whales are going to have language and we're going to use chat GPT to talk to them. But we're just not. I'm sorry. I mean, you can come back to me in 10 years when they've done it and say, ha ha, look at you, you fool. And I'll take that risk because I actually don't think it's a very good one.

A century ago, Hugh Lofting wrote a book about Dr Doolittle,

a vet who could speak animal languages.

I loved it as a kid,

and I started this project half seduced by the fantasy

that this old fable might come true with new technology.

Our fascination with recording animal voices began back in 1889,

when Ludwig Koch captured birdsong on crude wax cylinders.

Now we can pick up sounds we didn't even know with there.

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