Animal behaviorist Con Slobodchikoff has spent decades listening to how prairie dogs talk to each other. Now, the biologist is teaching machines to do the same — starting with dogs.
As founder and CEO of Zoolingua, Slobodchikoff is building an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can translate dog barks, yelps and growls into human language.
“We’re in the process of building an AI model, which will allow people to understand what their dogs are trying to communicate to them,” the professor emeritus of biology at Northern Arizona University told PYMNTS in an interview.
The project builds upon Slobodchikoff’s work as a biologist studying the alarm calls of prairie dogs — work that led him to conclude that animals have far more complex communication systems than scientists have traditionally acknowledged.
His work has been featured in a documentary jointly produced by the BBC and Animal Planet, as well as articles by National Geographic and the Smithsonian magazine. He also wrote the book, “Chasing Doctor Doolittle: Learning the Language of Animals.”
Slobodchikoff said the idea behind Zoolingua came from years of behavioral consulting with pet owners.
“Even though most people said that they really understood what their dog was trying to communicate to them, 80% of the time they were wrong,” Slobodchikoff said. “They totally missed the boat.”
Slobodchikoff hopes the AI model, which combines computer vision and deep learning, will help close that communication gap and lead to fewer pets being abandoned at animal shelters.
Eventually, he envisions developing a system that interprets not just basic signals like “I want to go outside,” but also more complex messages, such as “My shoulder hurts” or “There’s something wrong with my paw.”
He sees potential uses beyond the pet-owner relationship, including veterinary diagnostics and applications for service animals. “At this point, you can’t ask the dog, ‘What is your problem?’ So that’s what we’re looking at,” Slobodchikoff said.
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Prairie Dogs Know When You Have a Gun
But Zoolingua’s journey started long before the technology existed to support it.
As a young professor of biology, Slobodchikoff had originally been studying beetles. That changed when he developed an allergy to the noxious defensive chemicals they secreted.
“That meant that I had to find another research subject,” he said. “At the time, there were a lot of prairie dogs around my university, so I thought, why not study prairie dogs?”
What began as curiosity about the animals’ chirping alarm calls evolved into a discovery that challenged longstanding assumptions about animal communication.
Inspired by earlier research from the University of California, Davis showing that ground squirrels had different alarm calls for aerial and terrestrial predators, Slobodchikoff found that prairie dogs exhibited the same traits. But the variations within the prairie dogs’ calls suggested they were communicating even more.
The professor began wondering if the prairie dogs could describe the physical features of the predators. “Now this was completely way out at the time because nobody else had ever thought of that.”
So Slobodchikoff and his team ran experiments showing that prairie dogs could indeed describe a human intruder — even the shape and size of a person, color of their clothing, or whether they were carrying a gun.
Next, they tested the prairie dogs’ abilities to describe abstract shapes, like circles, triangles and ovals. “Sure enough, they could do that as well,” he said.
Encouraged by his research, Slobodchikoff worked with a computer scientist colleague to create an early AI model that could distinguish prairie dog calls for coyotes, dogs or humans. “That started me thinking about, ‘Can we do this with other animals?’” he said.
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Resistance to Animal ‘Languages’
Slobodchikoff said many instances of animal communication had some or all of the elements that meet criteria of what constitutes language as established by linguist Charles Hockett in the 1960s.
“It’s just that nobody was willing to call them languages, because that was considered by linguists to be a no-no,” Slobodchikoff said. “Biologists and linguists are very resistant to the idea that this is language. … They call it communication,” implying instinct rather than intentional thought.
The professor argued that the distinction is more than semantics. “Many biologists and linguists prefer to think that humans are exceptional in that we are the only ones with language.”
Citing work with prairie dogs that showed the use of abstract words, syntactic structures, and even elements like phonemes (units of sound) and morphemes (units of meaning), he believes their vocalizations meet Hockett’s criteria. “All of that we have found in prairie dogs,” he said.
While other researchers have explored animal communication — such as attempts to decode the vocalizations of dolphins and whales — Slobodchikoff is optimistic he will succeed in translating dog language.
“I have a very strong background in figuring out what a language might be or what kinds of signals might be relevant,” he said. “I think that this is channeling us into zones where I can use my expertise and I can work with computer people to employ this expertise to get a useful product.”
Zoolingua is training its model on video and audio clips from a wide range of dog breeds. Despite differences among breeds, “a lot of dogs understand the language of other dogs,” he said. “So there is a lot of commonality in all of this, which we are currently exploiting.”
Slobodchikoff estimates that a minimum viable product could be available in about 18 months. If successful, the technology could open new paths for understanding animals — and expand beyond dogs.
“Once we get the technology done for dogs, we can go on to cats using essentially the same technology,” the professor said. “Then go on to horses and sheep and goats, and ultimately, I would love to do this with wild animals.”
Behind the scientific ambition is a more personal motivation: empathy.
“I would always start off with a story about how we’re now down to about 1% to 2% of the prairie dogs we had 100 years ago, and people’s eyes would glaze over,” he said. “But then when I would say, ‘Prairie dogs can talk to each other’ … People’s eyes would open up and they’d say, ‘Maybe they’re kind of like us. Maybe we shouldn’t be killing them.’”
Slobodchikoff believes that recognizing language-like qualities in animals can help reshape our relationship with them.
“Humans are special, indeed,” he said. “But so is every single other species of animal in the world.”
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/
