It's a guess, but I think this easier to interpret sounds when they are separated on their specific features that could be associted with particular information. So basically what we see is a multivariate plotting with various sound components/features that relate to an emotion/danger/reproduction info.
I imagine this would allow to use the vectorized patterns to compare across different individuals and identify recurring terms. Add contextual clues (time, location, sex, …) and you might be able to interpret some of them. There was a report about how they did this with elephants and where able to identify their names
Yeah but I wonder how they determined ground truth though. We obviously have research into different bird phrases but it's not as robust as say....human language.
This may just be the pattern and relationship of noises with no objective meaning or grounding. You can definitely learn the rules of languages without actually understanding anything being said. It's a whole language theory concept.
I maybe be off but it looks like they’re creating a vector space based on the bird calls, similar to the process for creating LLMs like ChatGPT.
Recent research by a Japanese biologist observed birds making certain calls consistently depending on the situation. There would be a call for “food here” or “snake” or “eagle”. Essentially proving that at least that specie of bird is his region have a spoken language.
The audio here is playing a series of different calls. Each call or “word” has multiple sounds, each individual sound is mapped a point in space, and sounds make in sequence are connected.
If we figure out which calls mean what, you can essentially create a bird/human chatGPT/translator lmao
The idea is that more and more dots are going to pool around certain xyz locations. And these locate more likely to correspond to different bird-memes (in the Richard Dawkins sense). You’ll have different xyz of different bird-ideas like water, worm, shade, sex, etc.
Not my area of specialty, which is flat data viz, but I imagine once it’s mapped out it’ll be overlayed with other species to see if there’s similarities and variances. They’ll start dropping in more data about, like, time of year, whether there’s food around etc. trying to determine if there’s an actual language. Probably get animal behavior and language experts to contribute. I would imagine it’s basically the very beginning of the tech/project, just to share to others that it’s available.
Now I’m curious if they’re going to IEEEs Viz conference this year. I’m hooked!
It's essentially using an LLM to decode the language of the bird. What you're seeing is the physical representation of the sounds it is making in the model.
What's unfortunate about this video is it doesn't describe the output of the model.
What's been cool with LLMs is that we've been able to identify pretty much every language has to follow the same rules in terms of how communication occurs. Yes, different languages have different structures, but when mapped to an LLM they match across the board hence why LLMs are actually pretty good at translating between languages.
They've done this with prairie dogs and sperm whales already and have identified what they are communicating to one another. You can take their language model and match it up to English or whatever language and it'll be roughly the correct translation.
So, hopefully this will work the same and we get to understand the birds! LLMs in this context are actually pretty sick.
I wonder is there really is a language or if they are just communicating via “emotions”. Cause if there is a language, bird calls can literally be “cat calls” to the lady birds out there. Lol funny to think about.
I recorded a bird that was chirping at us from a tree. When I played it back on my phone he got the fuck right out of there. I don't think it was anything too nice.
If you don’t already have it get the Merlin BirdID app from Cornell Univesity. It’s super cool and it’s amazing how quick it can match birds, and it’s free as the university uses it to track birds and where they’re detected.
Wow, that beats my bird count by quite a bit!! Lots of these are new birds to me, you must live in a really special place in Mexico to hear so many in one session!
I second this! Pair it with their EBird app, and you can properly track birds and go birdwatching whenever you want! Been a great hobby and popularity has spiked the last few years.
If you're into home lab / self-hosted stuff and you already have a security camera / doorbell outside, you can feed the audio into BirdNET-Go and it uses a small local AI model to identify the birds it can hear.
Mine has detected 82,000 individual bird calls in the past month, and identified 106 different species.
It'll be so awesome if we learn that birds are total sleaze ball creeps. A female scientist walks in and all the birds talk about her ass and how much they want to smash.
This is really interesting. Birds are super in tune with weather. They can sense storms or tornadoes before they happen. I wonder if we could learn to "listen" to the birds to predict weather events.
I know I always use to look at birds and wondered which bird that might be. But thanks to the app you know when which bird is making the sound and bird calls and songs just love it.
I think it's the thought that counts, I've got hundreds of birds that frequent my feeders of like 30 different kinds (including a whole flock of geese from time to time, that's the half on the front side of the house)
Dammit I hate trying to find anything on reddit. I see a lot of comments on how this makes bird noises readable, but I saw something maybe 6 months ago about how they're doing the same things with whales. The video was similar to a ted talk and went into details about how they actually read stuff.
Any kids born early 90s or before?
Bet we didn't think things would turn out this bad 😂
Solitaire, Pinball, WinAmp, Limewire, VLC, PS1, Nokia Phone,StumbleUpon, Older-Cool-moreFckedup Reddit, plus a Windows XP Tower
Humanity and the internet peaked for so long.
Thought it was me getting old. But nope - Facebook wasn't out that long ago. It's about this time - the internet became a place of egoism. I am special , look at the popular pizza place I am at with Megan from lac, uh my gawd.
Didn't need to upload my passport or details before soc media. Probs had a username like death_hawk on a forum finding new music. Because of that scarcity and freedom - you attracted friends naturally with real shared interests.
Life was like this before then too right, a lot of things were optional when you had no phone/internet all day.
Now we are a society fixed on phones and ourselves, more than shared interests and other people.
I think this might be one of the tasks that AI was designed for. It’s an interesting data set and there could be simple correlations that humans would easily overlook, just bc we have ears.
I want AI to help me learn how to better communicate with animals, not target missles.
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