Dolphin whistle instantly translated by computer

[Ichingcarpenter]

Software has performed the first real-time translation of a dolphin whistle – and better data tools are giving fresh insights into primate communication too

IT was late August 2013 and Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean. The dolphin pod she had been tracking for the past 25 years was playing around her boat. Suddenly, she heard one of them say, "Sargassum".

"I was like whoa! We have a match. I was stunned," says Herzing, who is the director of the Wild Dolphin Project. She was wearing a prototype dolphin translator called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) and it had just translated a live dolphin whistle for the first time.

It detected a whistle for sargassum, or seaweed, which she and her team had invented to use when playing with the dolphin pod. They hoped the dolphins would adopt the whistles, which are easy to distinguish from their own natural whistles – and they were not disappointed. When the computer picked up the sargassum whistle, Herzing heard her own recorded voice saying the word into her ear.

As well as boosting our understanding of animal behaviour, the moment hints at the potential for using algorithms to analyse any activity where information is transmitted – including our daily activities (see "Scripts for life&quot .


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129624.300-dolphin-whistle-instantly-translated-by-computer.html#.UzVABGRdVBW

[Loudly]

1. But wasn't the dolphin just imitating a novel whistle sound?

It wasn't actually making an intentional reference to seaweed was it?

How much do parrots understand about the substance of what they're talking about?

Or this guy?

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Parrots are not dolphins

and cats don't even have a quarter of the brain.


Do some research before making an imitation of a novel whistle sound.

Novel whistle sound.......LOL.

[Warpy]

4. We've found out animals aren't quite what we thought they were

Prairie dogs have a language they use to identify potential predators, down to sex and color of clothing a human is wearing. Chimps are smarter at arithmetic than we are.

Some species of dying bacteria release a substance that alerts bacteria around them that the colony is under attack, surrounding bacteria suicide (see: lysosomes) and the agent is contained before it threatens the whole colony.

We're in the infancy of understanding other life around us. If we have any illusion about communicating with off planet life far into the future, we're going to have to get better at understanding the creatures with whom we share a planetary point of reference.

While the dolphins might have been dolphin-hear-dolphin-say, imitating a whistle that sounded funny to them without realizing humans had given it a meaning, it's progress. When we can understand their own word for sargasso, that's better progress.

[Yo_Mama]

5. My thoughts too.

I'm not sure what this really means, but it seems to be less than fully grounded.

[Javaman]

3. Here's the translation:

are you wiretapping me?