Can We Learn To Talk to Sperm Whales? @TED #ted #shorts

These are the sounds of the mighty sperm whale.

There's clear structure in how these animals communicate.

We just don't yet know what they're saying.

Our team of AI specialists, roboticists, linguists and marine biologists

aim to use the most cutting-edge technologies

to make contact with another species,

We're going to put specific  focus on the interactions

of mothers and calfs,

training our machine learning algorithms to  learn whale language from the bottom up.

The raw audio and context data

will go through our  machine learning engine

where it's going to be first sorted by structure.

The linguistics team will then search for things like

syntax and time displacement.

And once we've really mastered listening,

we're going to try really carefully

to talk back even on the most simplistic level.

And all the platforms that we develop can be  cross-applied to other animals:  

to elephants, birds, primates, dolphins --

essentially any animal.