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Have you ever wanted to have a conversation with your dog or cat? The bad news is that communications with house pets may never be possible, but researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project founded by Denise Herzing have made steps to one day having a device that will be able to translate dolphin noises allowing humans to communicate with another species.
For the next phase in learning dolphin-speak Herzing is going high-tech. She’s collaborating with Georgia Tech artificial intelligence scientist Thad Starner on what they call the Catacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) project. The idea behind CHAT is to “co-create” a language with the dolphins using the sounds that dolphins normally use to communicate with each other. Once the dolphins have learned the “words,” the researchers hope to eavesdrop and pick up other “words”–real ones that the dolphins use during their normal communication.
The versatile sound-making abilities of dolphins poses a major challenge for CHAT. Dolphins can make sounds of frequencies up to 200 kilohertz. That’s about 10 times the highest pitch that humans can hear. Dolphins can also shift a signal’s pitch or maintain it for extended periods of time. In addition, they can change the direction of projected sounds without moving their heads, making it hard for researchers to identify which dolphin said what so that they can correlate the sounds with specific behaviors.
NEC is developing a gadget that will translate spoken words into text displayed on a user’s eyes:
The prototype device called a “Tele Scouter” is a glasses type display that translates the foreign language being spoken by a partner and projects the translation onto a tiny retinal display.
The device mounted on an eyeglass frame consists of the retinal display, front-mounted camera and microphone, but doesn’t perform the translation itself. Rather the microphone picks up the conversation and transmits it to a portable computer worn on the user’s waist. This computer in turn transmits the information to a remote server, which is responsible for carrying out the heavy processing of converting the speech to text, translating it and sending it back to the wearable parts of the system to be displayed on the retinal display.
This gadget, developed by the Japanese toy company Takara Tomy, will allegedly translate a dog’s barks:
The gadget can tell you if your dog is sad, joyful, alert to danger, needy, happy or frustrated.
The £129 gadget can be placed on the dog’s collar and includes a receiver which would translate the dogs’ barks. The translated bark is displayed on the receiver which also plays in audio phrases like ‘I feel sad’ or ‘Leave me alone’ (no phrases about desiring a juicy steak?) the toy will hit the Japanese market on August 27th
Note that the device will only translate a dog’s barks into Japanese, so those of you not fluent in that language may wish to get some help when using it.
Link via Geekologie
