With Slobodchikoff, a professor at the University of Northern Arizona specializing in animal behavior, he is conducting important research around this issue
Among all the experiments and advances underway we can deduce many of the things that they will allow us to make mobile devices in the future. Voice and gesture control, giving orders to other objects, such as the fridge or an irrigation system, integrating with the software that cars will have… are some examples. All this is under investigation and there is a wealth of news about the progress being made. On the other hand, there are other more unexplored fields, but they will also help to configure the next generation of electronics. Among them is communication with animals.
In a few years, devices may allow us to communicate with animals through sounds. They would serve two functions. The first of these would be to understand their language, which they emit in the form of phonemes, although they are also expressed through body signs, an aspect that could also be picked up by electronics through image recognition. From there the information would be analyzed to identify what they meant, cross-checking it with a database to look for common patterns. The second phase of the communicative process is to give a response. A person could dictate it to his smartphone and it would translate it to the sounds of the animal, in the same way that a sentence is translated from English to Spanish.
This is the idea he has with Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus at the University of Northern Arizona and a specialist in animal behavior. After studying for years the habits and forms of communication of the prairie puppies (medium-sized rodents that emit barks similar to the canine) he is investigating, together with a colleague expert in artificial intelligence, techniques to return answers to this species in their own language.
Slobodchikoff has studied prairie puppies in detail and found that they have a complex and defined code. Individuals in the colony communicate through alerts. If a predator approaches, they warn each other. However, they make different sounds if a coyote, a dog or a human is nearbyfor example. Measured in time and frequency it is possible to identify the common patterns used in each situation by different specimens.
So far the scientist has only studied in depth the prairie puppies. But you could do the same with different species. How would this knowledge be transferred to a device and, above all, how could responses be returned to animals? Slobodchikoff and his colleague are keeping track of the sounds and using AI-based technology to analyze and translate data for people(to English, in this case). The process for a human to issue the answer would be the reverse, moving from English to the language of the prairie dogs.
They estimate that in five or ten years a sufficiently advanced version of this technology could be available. To create systems of this type it is necessary a deep field study and from there let use techniques related to big data. In this way the communication with the animals could be reduced to the capture of sounds and the realization of queries to a database.
Devices to change the relationship between humans and animals
If the possibilities offered by our smartphones provide the ability to communicate in an advanced way with the animals, this could represent a leap most important social that many of the technologies that are currently being implemented, apart from opening the door to a study that fall within the philosophical, to better understand the creatures, their integration within human societies would be optimized. Which would not only be positive for them, people would also benefit.
In a hypothetical scenario like Slobodchikoff’s, the owner of a dog might know that it is hungry when your device analyze the type of bark. In the same way I could understand that another sound means “my bowl of stool is dirty” (although the animal did not express them in such a fine way). These interactions are not particularly complex, but they could be taken to a higher level. When the dog was having an aggressive behavior it would be easier to understand why it is so, calm him down and discover a solution.
Coexistence or at least interaction with animals is constant in human societies. Not only as pets in cities, also on farms. In the latter context, perhaps we could improve livestock conditions with small efforts, perhaps increasing production, making decisions based on the conclusions drawn to communicate more closely. Slobodchikoff hopes that these investigations will serve to change somehow the relationship of exploitation between man and animals for one closer to the concept of association.
Image size: 37prime
