AI is moving forward with plans to help humans communicate with animals, and a promising step comes from a new tool called DolphinGemma.

Developed by Google DeepMind, DolphinGemma is a large language model (LLM) trained on dolphin audio data to help decode how dolphins talk to each other. The goal? To someday allow human-animal communication, a concept once thought to be purely science fiction.

“I like to think that we will be able to talk to animals at some point,” said Drew Purves, Nature Lead at Google DeepMind, on the company’s podcast.

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What Is DolphinGemma?

DolphinGemma is DeepMind’s pioneering AI model designed to analyze and interpret dolphin vocalizations. Built in collaboration with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project, the model separates, tokenizes, and processes dolphin sounds into structured data.

This method mirrors how LLMs like ChatGPT are trained on human language—only this time, the language belongs to dolphins.

“It takes the sounds, separates them, tokenizes them, and brings it into the world of large language modeling,” said Purves. “That’s an example of AI actively being used to study animal communication at a level we really couldn’t do before.”

Learn more at Business Insider’s coverage of DeepMind.

The Role of the Wild Dolphin Project

Founded in 1985, the Wild Dolphin Project has been conducting long-term field research on Atlantic spotted dolphins.

Their decades of underwater audio and behavioral recordings have provided a vital dataset for AI training. Their collaboration with DeepMind now gives scientists computational power to decode dolphin interactions with unprecedented accuracy.

More about the project can be found here.

Google DeepMind has a Vision for AI and Nature

DeepMind is not alone in this pursuit. The Earth Species Project, a nonprofit established in 2017, is building NatureLM-audio, the world’s first large audio-language model trained on animal sounds. Their mission is to help humanity shift from exploiting nature to truly connecting with it.

“We’re extracting, we’re taming, we’re exploiting the rest of nature — that’s not the goal here,” said Katie Zacarian, CEO of Earth Species Project.

“These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything,” added Aza Raskin, the nonprofit's cofounder.

Learn more at Scientific American and Earth Species Project.