AI and dolphin communication — Denise Herzing has spent decades listening to dolphins. The founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project began considering how Atlantic spotted dolphins communicate during a 1985 research trip to the Bahamas, where their clicks and whistles first caught her attention. Now, she says, artificial intelligence is giving her the tools to make sense of the sounds.
Speaking at WIRED World Fair, Herzing described how AI is helping her team organize a vast archive of dolphin video and audio. The work, conducted with scientists at Georgia Tech and Google DeepMind, aims to uncover structure in dolphin vocalizations. Full translation is not yet on the table.
Finding Patterns in Decades of Recordings
Herzing’s group has accumulated countless hours of footage and sound from wild dolphins. According to Herzing, AI is proving useful for detecting patterns within that material. She characterized the technology as a powerful new tool and said she had personally been waiting for it to arrive.
The research has also extended into attempts at two-way communication. Herzing’s team has tested an underwater wearable computer designed to play dolphin sounds. In one line of experimentation, researchers used sounds to represent objects and habitats—a scarf and sargassum, a type of seaweed, among them. Two researchers would demonstrate a behavior: one would play the scarf sound, for example, and the other would interact with the scarf. The dolphins’ responses were then observed.
Mimicry Is Not the Same as Understanding
A central difficulty is distinguishing imitation from comprehension. Herzing noted that even when the team played whistles and labeled toys, there is a substantial gap between a dolphin mimicking a sound and a dolphin understanding what the sound is meant to convey. She said that distinction is hard to establish in the wild, and suggested that working in a sanctuary or a more controlled setting might help researchers resolve it.
What dolphins actually say to one another remains largely unknown. Herzing’s team has made progress in identifying patterns, but a genuine two-way conversation is still some distance away. Humans have gained a reasonable understanding of dolphin social hierarchies and behavior, yet much more work is needed before conversation becomes possible.
“We might have the data and the structure, but what does it mean in dolphin culture?” Herzing said. She described that question as an exploration in its own right.
Why the Effort Matters
The appeal of talking with dolphins is obvious, but Herzing framed the research in broader terms. Attempts to understand dolphins, she said, could also deepen human understanding of ourselves and of our relationship with the planet.
She offered one illustration. When she asks people what they believe dolphins would say to humans, the most frequent response is a variation on a question: why are you damaging our ocean? Herzing said that answer reveals something about how people think about the world.
