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Why try to understand Gen Z slang when it might be easier to communicate with animals? Today, Google unveiled DolphinGemma, an open-source AI model designed to decode dolphin communication by analyzing their clicks, whistles, and burst pulses. The announcement coincided with National Dolphin Day. The model, created in partnership with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), learns the structure of dolphins’ vocalizations and can generate dolphin-like sound sequences. The breakthrough could help determine whether dolphin communication rises to the level of language or not. Trained on the world’s longest-running underwater dolphin research project, DolphinGemma leverages decades of meticulously labeled audio and video data collected by WDP since 1985. The project has studied Atlantic Spotted Dolphins in the Bahamas across generations using a non-invasive approach they call “In Their World, on Their Terms.” “By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins’ natural communication—a task previously requiring immense human effort,” Google said in its announcement. The AI model, which contains roughly 400 million parameters, is small enough to run on Pixel phones that researchers use in the field. It processes dolphin sounds using Google’s SoundStream tokenizer and predicts subsequent sounds in a sequence, much like how human language models predict the next word in a sentence. DolphinGemma doesn’t operate in isolation. It works alongside the CHAT (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry) system, which associates synthetic whistles with specific objects dolphins enjoy, such as sargassum, seagrass, or scarves, potentially establishing a shared vocabulary for interaction. “Eventually, these patterns, augmented with synthetic sounds created by the researchers to refer to objects with which the dolphins like to play, may establish a shared vocabulary with the dolphins for interactive communication,” according to Google. Field researchers currently use Pixel 6 phones for…

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Filed under: News - @ April 15, 2025 1:22 am