We Will Soon Be Able to Communicate with Dolphins Using Artificial Intelligence (5 photos + 1 video)

A new AI model developed by Google is unlocking the secrets of dolphin communication. There is hope that in the future we will be able to communicate in the language of these amazing creatures.





The DolphinGemma model was trained using the Wild Dolphin acoustic archive, and this is the richest collection of dolphin sounds recorded over several years.

Denise Herzing, the scientific director of the Wild Dolphin project, said: “We don’t know if animals have words. Dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, they use tools and are very smart, but language is still the last barrier, so AI will be able to detect if they have patterns, subtleties that humans cannot pick up on.”



DolphinGemma will help to identify patterns.

Tas Starner, a scientist at Google DeepMind, notes: “The model can reveal hidden structures and potential meanings in dolphin communication that previously required significant human effort. We are just beginning to understand patterns in sounds.”





In 2022, scientists from the University of Sassari in Italy discovered that dolphins have regional accents. Bottlenose dolphins recognize each other by special whistles, and these sounds are unique to each individual animal.

Gabriella La Manna and her colleagues studied six populations of bottlenose dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea. They analyzed 188 hours of recordings and identified various acoustic characteristics, such as duration and pitch changes. In the end, they identified 168 characteristic whistles.



They found that the local ocean environment and population size had the greatest influence on the pitch of the whistles.

In areas with sea grass, such as Lampedusa and Port-Cros, the whistles were higher pitched and shorter, while in areas with muddy bottoms, they were lower pitched and longer.

In addition, in smaller populations, such as in the Gulf of Corinth, the calls showed greater variation in pitch.



Last year, a scientist who is called the real-life Doctor Dolittle identified the meaning of some dolphin sounds.

Arik Kershenbaum, an animal communication expert at the University of Cambridge, admits that dolphin communication is one of the most difficult to study. He found a repeating sound in the recording. He suggests that it may be a “characteristic whistle” that is equivalent to the dolphin’s name.

Based on this, it is possible that this is a recording of one dolphin greeting another.