The animal with which scientists intend to communicate thanks to artificial intelligence

Google, an American institute and an NGOs joined to try to translate and understand the sounds of the dolphins, taking advantage of the AI

04/16/2025 – 14: 35hs

Artificial intelligence could open a New chapter in communication between species. An innovative system developed by Google and the Dolphin wild project seeks to translate and replicate the complex language of these intelligent marine animals, marking a milestone in decades of research. For lovers of nature and science fiction, the idea of ​​talking with other species has always been a fascinating dream. Now, that yearning could be one step closer to becoming a reality. A team of researchers from the Dolphin Wild project (WDP), in collaboration with technological giants such as Google and the Georgia Technological Institute, is at the forefront of a revolutionary project: Dolphingemma, an artificial intelligence system designed to understand and potentially interact with the complex world of dolphins vocalizations.

For more than four decades, WDP scientists have dedicated their efforts to unraveling the mysteries of communication of the mottled dolphins of the Atlantic in the waters of the Bahamas. Through exhaustive submarine audio and video recordingsThey have managed to correlate certain sounds with specific behaviors, from courtship rituals and the identification of unique “names”, to the inevitable disputes within the community. However, the necessary technology to analyze and replicate the intricate range of whistles, clicks and pulses of these cetaceans had so far been an insurmountable obstacle.

The recent explosion in the field of extensive language models (LLMS), the same technology that drives systems such as Chatgpt, opened a new and promising route of research. Could the principles behind these sophisticated apply to the understanding of the interactions between dolphins? To test this hypothesis, The WDP united forces with Google and the Technological Institute of Georgia, providing engineers with vast and meticulously labeled Dolphin Vocalizations Database for training a specialized LLM.

Scientists will try to achieve communication with dolphins thanks to artificial intelligence

How Dolphingemma works, artificial intelligence to talk to Delfines

The result of this collaboration is Dolphingemma, an artificial intelligence model built with the same architecture that supports Google Gemini systems. With approximately 400 million parameters, Dolphingemma is designed to function in a similar way to the text predictive, but focused on the language of dolphins. Its operation is based on receiving and interpreting audio tickets and then predicting the most likely subsequent sounds, allowing their recreation.

This innovative model is complemented by the chat system (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry), installed on Google Pixel phones. Chat does not seek a complete translation of the natural language of dolphins, but rather to facilitate the development of a shared and simplified vocabulary between humans and cetaceans. The initial plan consists in teaching the mottled dolphins of the WDP’s Atlantic a series of synthetic whistles associated with their favorite objects, such as marine meadows, sargassum and even researchers’ scarves. Over time, experts expect dolphins to even learn to request the desired objects when they want to play.

While there is still a long way to go before we can hold fluid conversations with dolphins, the development of Dolphingemma represents a transcendental advance. This creative application of extensive language models brings us one more step to the possibility of listening and being heard in the fascinating underwater world, marking a potential turning point in our understanding of the animal kingdom and opening the door to future interspecies interactions. The culmination of more than four decades of dedication to the investigation and conservation of these extraordinary animals could be available to our hands, or rather, of our ears.