Denise Herzing: AI lets Wild Dolphin Project find patterns in dolphin talk

Herzing's interest in dolphin communication dates back to a 1985 trip to the Bahamas to study Atlantic spotted dolphins, where she heard their telltale clicks and whistles. The intervening four decades produced countless hours of video and audio footage, but not the means to give that material structure.

The current collaboration with Georgia Tech and Google DeepMind is aimed at finding patterns in that archive, not at full translation. Separately, the team has rigged an underwater wearable computer that plays dolphin sounds, using them to indicate items like a scarf and habitat like sargassum, a seaweed, to see how dolphins respond.

Herzing flagged a gap between mimicking and understanding the function of a sound, and suggested that working in a sanctuary or more controlled environment might help researchers tell the two apart. What dolphins actually say to each other remains a bit of a mystery, and she framed the meaning of the patterns in dolphin culture as an exploration of its own.