Earlier this year, Mickey Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher now at Cornell University, reported a similar technique in which he spent 14 months in Kenya recording elephant calls, which the animals make trumpet-like warning sounds, though most of their calls are actually low-pitched grunts that are only partially audible to humans.
Pardo also found evidence that elephants use audio labels, and said that playing sounds of other elephants talking to them was a sure way to get an elephant's attention. But does this mean that the researchers have discovered a “talking animal”?
No, says Pardo. He thinks true language means the ability to discuss what happened in the past and to string together more complex ideas. Pardo says he next wants to find out whether elephants have specific sounds that help them decide which watering hole to go to – whether they use place names.
There are some efforts underway to explore whether animal sounds have more meaning than we thought. This year, a group called Project CETI, which studies sperm whale songs, found that they are far more complex than previously realized, meaning that in theory the animals could use a kind of grammar, though it's unclear whether they're actually saying anything concrete.
Another effort, the Earth Species Project, aims to “use artificial intelligence to decipher non-human communication” and has begun helping researchers collect more data on animal sounds to feed into their models.
The Israeli team also plans to test the latest in artificial intelligence. The team's marmosets are kept in a research facility, and Omer has already set up microphones in the marmosets' living space to record everything they say 24 hours a day.
Omar says their conversations will be used to train large language models that could, in theory, be used to finish a string of calls initiated by the monkeys or generate what they predict will be an appropriate reply. But do primate language models actually make sense, or just ramble on and on about nonsense?
Only monkeys can say for sure.
“I don't have any delusional expectations that they'll talk about Nietzsche,” Omer said. “I don't expect it to be super complex like humans, but I do expect it to help us understand something about how our language developed.”