In April 2026, scientists reported that sperm whales make sounds that behave like human vowels. Two months later, a researcher won $100,000 for a “dictionary” of 11 zebra finch calls. Suddenly, the old dream of being able to talk to animals doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched. Imagine asking a whale how its day went.
Artificial intelligence is behind much of this progress. It can sift through millions of clicks, whistles and caws that no human could ever listen to. But can it actually tell us what animals are saying? Here’s what AI has decoded so far, and where it still falls short.
Ocean voices AI is learning to read
Sperm whales and their “vowels”
Sperm whales chat in codas: short bursts of clicks that sound a little like Morse code. Project CETI, a team of marine biologists, linguists and AI experts, has been listening to the whales off the Caribbean island of Dominica for years. Its underwater gliders can detect whales about 12 km away and then follow them on their own.
In 2024, the team analysed 8,719 codas from about 60 whales and found them far more structured than anyone expected. Then, in April 2026, a study led by linguist Gašper Beguš went further. It found two types of coda with vowel-like sound patterns, nicknamed “a-codas” and “i-codas”.
The researchers are careful not to call it a language yet, because no one knows what the codas mean. Still, CETI’s founder, David Gruber, says the team already has its first simple language models for sperm whales.
Orcas that sound surprisingly human
The same researchers then turned to orcas, also known as killer whales. In a study released in early 2026, they analysed 61 hours of recordings from tags on the whales. They found vowel-like patterns, and some calls even resembled the consonant-and-vowel combinations of human speech.
Meanwhile in Canada, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation is using AI tools from the nonprofit Earth Species Project to link orca calls to behaviour. Matching recordings with drone footage and field notes used to take months. Now it takes about an hour.
Dolphins with alarm calls and questions
Bottlenose dolphins are famous for “signature whistles”, which work rather like names. But in Sarasota, Florida, a team led by Laela Sayigh studied the whistles that aren’t names. Playing them back to wild dolphins suggested that one works as an alarm, while another seems to ask a question when something unexpected happens.
That work won the first Coller Dolittle Prize in 2025. Google has joined in too. Its DolphinGemma model learns patterns in recordings of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins. It then predicts which sound is likely to come next, much as a chatbot predicts the next word. It’s small enough to run on the phones researchers carry in the field.
Birds with a vocabulary
Zebra finches and their 11 “words”
Zebra finches are small, chatty birds from Australia. Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, has listened to them for more than 15 years. With help from machine learning, she sorted their calls into 11 core types, with meanings such as hunger, distress, aggression and saying hello.
Then she checked her dictionary with the birds themselves. The finches learned to press buttons that played the calls. Tellingly, they mixed up calls with similar meanings more often than calls that simply sounded alike. In other words, they seem to understand what their own calls mean. The work won Elie the 2026 Coller Dolittle Prize.
Crows that mostly whisper
In northern Spain, carrion crows raise their chicks as a family, with relatives helping out. Researchers at the University of León recorded them with microphones and small data loggers. Then they hit a problem: far more audio than they could ever listen to.
AI tools from the Earth Species Project picked out more than 127,000 calls and told adults apart from chicks and from other birds. The surprise? Most crow calls are soft murmurs, which suggests much of their chatter happens up close.
What is your dog really saying?
Barks carry more than you think
Dogs haven’t been left out. In 2024, a University of Michigan team took an AI model built for human speech and trained it on barks from 74 dogs. It could tell playful barks from aggressive ones, and even pick out a dog’s breed and sex.
At Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, Rytis Maskeliūnas has found that German shepherds’ barks carry patterns linked to different emotions. But he warns that spotting an emotion isn’t the same as understanding a message. A realistic gadget, he suggests, might simply tell you that your dog is making unusual sounds for it. So take any app that promises to “translate” your pet with a pinch of salt.
The catch: patterns aren’t meaning
What toddlers taught the AI
In September 2026, researchers at Tel Aviv University put AI to a clever test. Instead of animals, they used sounds made by toddlers who couldn’t yet talk properly, because adults can at least partly tell what toddlers mean. The sounds came from three situations: distress, calling for mum or dad, and asking for food.
The AI models grouped the sounds by how they sounded, not by what they meant. Even the best ones put some calls with different messages together. They also missed rising urgency, which human listeners pick up naturally. To truly understand animals, the team says, AI must be combined with watching behaviour, playback experiments and sometimes brain studies.
So, can we talk to animals yet?
Not quite. AI can now pick out whale “vowels”, sort finch calls and spot a stressed dog. But knowing what an animal is saying, let alone replying, is still a long way off.
The race is on, though. The Coller Dolittle Challenge offers a grand prize worth up to $10 million to the first team to achieve genuine two-way communication with an animal. Its backer, Jeremy Coller, believes the code will be cracked by 2030. Many scientists are more cautious, and orca researcher Valeria Vergara says we should be happy simply to understand animals on their own terms.
Which animal would you most like to have a conversation with? Tell us in the comments.
Curious about other tech that’s changing everyday life? Find out how a new laser technology could test for dementia in five minutes. Or check the 8 signs of phone addiction and how technology keeps you hooked. And pin this one for the day your dog finally talks back.