logo
episode-header-image
Sep 2023
32m 42s

Can AI help us speak to animals? Karen B...

Financial Times
About this episode

The Canadian scientist and author Karen Bakker, who died unexpectedly in August this year, was a leading voice in the bioacoustic research community. Her 2022 book, The Sounds of Life, explained how it might one day be possible to create a kind of Google Translate for animals and was the inspiration behind this Tech Tonic series. This episode contains the full interview that we recorded with her. We are posting it as a tribute to her remarkable work. 


Free links:

Google Translate for the zoo? How humans might talk to animals

Karen Bakker, scientist and author, 1971-2023

How generative AI really works


Credits: Elephant bee rumble from Lucy King


Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Up next
Jul 8
Trump’s tech bros: The enigma of Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel is unlike any other Trump tech bro. As well as a wildly successful investor, he’s seen as a thinker - the philosopher king of Silicon Valley. Thiel’s acolytes in the tech world and Washington include vice-president JD Vance but his relationship with the Trump camp is ... Show More
31m 7s
Jul 1
Trump’s Tech Bros: Is ‘Maga Mark’ the real Mark Zuckerberg?
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has undergone a transformation, both physical and political. The skinny teenager who founded Facebook in his dorm room is now a muscular jiu-jitsu enthusiast who’s called US President Donald Trump a “badass” and wants to see more “masculine en ... Show More
29m 14s
Jun 24
Trump’s Tech Bros: Has Jeff Bezos sold out?
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was once a vocal critic of Donald Trump. But that changed during last year’s election campaign. Now, he has instructed the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, to shift its editorial line to be more in line with the president. So what provoked Bezos’s ... Show More
25m 42s
Recommended Episodes
Sep 2023
Can AI help us speak to animals? Part one
A hardware revolution in recording devices and a software revolution in artificial intelligence is enabling researchers to listen in to all kinds of conversations outside the human hearing range, a field known as bioacoustics. Some scientists now believe these developments will a ... Show More
29m 12s
Sep 2023
Can AI help us speak to animals? Part two
A hardware revolution in recording devices and a software revolution in artificial intelligence has convinced some scientists that humans will eventually be able to ‘translate’ animal and even plant sounds into human language. But what would be the consequences of humans learning ... Show More
24m 50s
Oct 2023
Could an orca give a TED Talk? | Karen Bakker
What if we could hear nature's ultrasonic communication -- and talk back? From a bat's shrill speech to a peacock's infrasound mating call, conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker takes us through a sound bath of animal noises that are far outside humanity's range of hear ... Show More
15m 37s
Sep 2023
Coming soon: Can AI help us speak to animals?
Subscribe now to the FT's Tech Tonic podcast: Some scientists believe that rapid advances in artificial intelligence may also hold the key to decoding animal sounds, allowing us to ‘translate’ them into human language. In a new season of Tech Tonic, FT innovation editor John Thor ... Show More
1m 9s
Nov 2024
Could an orca give a TED Talk? | Karen Bakker
What if we could hear nature's ultrasonic communication -- and talk back? From a bat's shrill speech to a peacock's infrasound mating call, conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker takes us through a sound bath of animal noises that are far outside humanity's range of hear ... Show More
14m 45s
Sep 2023
Coming soon: Can AI help us speak to animals?
Some scientists believe that rapid advances in artificial intelligence may also hold the key to decoding animal sounds, allowing us to ‘translate’ them into human language. In a new season of Tech Tonic, FT innovation editor John Thornhill and series producer Persis Love explore ... Show More
1m 9s
Sep 2023
Coming soon: Can AI help us speak to animals?
Subscribe now to the FT's Tech Tonic podcast: Some scientists believe that rapid advances in artificial intelligence may also hold the key to decoding animal sounds, allowing us to ‘translate’ them into human language. In a new season of Tech Tonic, FT innovation editor John Thor ... Show More
1m 9s
Mar 2023
Digital Dr. Dolittle: decoding animal conversations with artificial intelligence
Whenever I'm out doing field work or on a hike, I’ve not only got my eyes wide open, but my ears too. There’s a lot going on in a forest or under the sea - the sounds of nature. So many of those sounds in nature are about communication.Personally, I love to chat with ravens. I li ... Show More
49m 36s
Nov 2022
Turtle Voices, a Pandemic Retrospective and a Nose-Picking Primate
New recordings featuring the voices of 53 species of turtle, caecilian and tuatara previously thought to be silent have illuminated the evolutionary origins of vocal communication. Gabriel Jorgevich-Cohen a PhD student at the University of Zurich has travelled the world collectin ... Show More
31m 18s
Nov 2021
Introducing: A Show About Animals
Today we are sharing an episode from one of our newest series -- A Show About Animals. This season, we tell the strange and wonderful story of the wildly famous Koko the “talking” Gorilla.  In the early 1970s, a grad student named Penny Patterson set out to investigate a big ques ... Show More
36m 33s