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Dolphin Translator Relays First Word
Can we handle what dolphins have to tell us?CNET News reports:
Scientists at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) who have been developing a dolphin translator may have succeeded in getting their software to work.
WDP director Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean with a pod of dolphins she has been tracking for 25 years, wearing a prototype of a dolphin translator called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Thad Starner, when one of the dolphin’s whistles was translated as the word “sargassum” — a type of seaweed.
Humans have for some time been communicating with dolphins on a rudimentary level. The animals are capable of responding appropriately to commands and learning to recognise symbols.
The whistle picked up by CHAT, translated into human speech, was not a whistle from the dolphins’ natural repertoire. Instead, Herzing and her team invented a series of whistles and ascribed them to certain things — one of which was sargassum — and trained the dolphins to repeat the whistles when they encountered those things.
If the CHAT program succeeds, two-way human-dolphin communication will become a real possibility. It won’t work universally — dolphins “speak” in regional dialects — but it may be possible to one day know what really goes on in those strange, shiny heads.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/04/dolphin-translator-relays-first-word/
