Humans could soon be able to understand animal talk

Artificial intelligence (AI) is able to work out what animals are trying to say through the analysis of sounds and actions.

Dr Arik Kershenbaum, from the University of Cambridge's department of zoology, explained: "You can feed the AI a million recordings of whales and it says, 'OK, there are 300 types of whale song.'

"And then you say, 'Song type No1 is used mostly when the whales are feeding' or 'No2 is mostly when the whales are competing.'"

The expert has previously identified wolf-pack dialects and warned that animals have a very different "language" to humans.

He said: "Animals calls are very fuzzy in their meaning."

For example, Dr Kershenbaum explained that dolphins do not have a word for fish.

He explained: "They might use particular sounds to indicate that they want fish, or to indicate something about fish, or to communicate information about fish. But there's no one word for it."

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