The post-tax season news you need: Groundbreaking tech lets you talk to a dolphin

While artificial intelligence (AI) is steadily taking over the globe, affecting numerous industries and helping humans across different sectors, a new way to use the technology might have you feeling like Dr. Doolittle. 

Google has recently achieved an unthinkable feat: a new large language model (LLM) allowing humans to converse with Dolphins. Yes, you read that right. Dolphins. 

Known as DolphinGemma, the researchers are currently testing to see if this LLM and its Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (CHAT) system can mimic the vocal behavior of dolphins. 

If successful, the breakthrough may represent the culmination of over four decades’ worth of work, documentation and conservation efforts. 

Dolphins are regarded as one of the smartest sea creatures known to mankind. Their complex social interactions have been a subject of study for researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) for 40 years. 

Throughout this process, researchers have accumulated a wealth of underwater audio and video documentation about a single community of Atlantic dolphins in the Bahamas. 

The researchers have managed to correlate sounds with behavioral patterns such as courtships, unique names and even dolphin quarrels. 

Experts have believed that it’s possible for man to communicate with cetaceans, but the task has looked impossible due to the lack of advanced technology that can parse and mimic underwater whistles, clicks and burst pulses of these creatures. 

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers recently wondered if the same principles underlying LLMs could be applied to dolphin interactions. WDP partnered with Google and the Georgia Institute of Technology to train the LLM. 

This is what DolphinGemma is all about. An AI model that is built on the same technology that runs Google’s Gemini systems. DolphinGemma has around 400 million parameters to function like predictive LLMs like ChatGPT—but for dolphins.  

DolphinGemma receives and interprets audio inputs and then predicts likely subsequent sounds for recreation. Then, it partners with the CHAT system installed on the modified Google Pixel smartphones. The CHAT system cannot entirely translate a dolphin’s natural way of communication, but it can help humans establish a more simplified, shared vocabulary. 

The goal is to gradually teach members of the WDP’s Atlantic spotted dolphin community a set of artificial whistles, each linked to a favorite object like seagrass, sargassum, or even researchers’ scarves. Eventually, scientists hope the dolphins will learn to use these whistles to request specific items when they want to play. 

This innovative approach could offer new insights into how dolphins use sound to communicate desires and form social bonds. If successful, it may also pave the way for more advanced interspecies communication experiments in the future.