15 May 2025 | By Christa Lesté-Lasserre (Christa Lesté-Lasserre is a journalist in Paris.)
Can a robot arm wave hello to a cuttlefish—and get a hello back? Could a dolphin’s whistle actually mean “Where are you?” And are monkeys quietly naming each other while we fail to notice?
These are just a few of the questions tackled by the finalists for this year’s Dolittle prize, a $100,000 award recognizing early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interspecies communication. The winning project—announced today—explores how dolphins use shared, learned whistles that may carry specific meanings—possibly even warning each other about danger, or just expressing confusion. The other contending teams—working with marmosets, cuttlefish, and nightingales—are also pushing the boundaries of what human-animal communication might look like.
The prize marks an important milestone in the Coller Dolittle Challenge, a 5-year competition offering up to $10 million to the first team that can achieve genuine two-way communication with animals. “Part of how this initiative was born came from my skepticism,” says Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the prize’s organizers. “But we really have much better tools now. So this is the time to revisit a lot of our previous assumptions about two-way communication within the animal’s own world.”
Science caught up with the four finalists to hear how close we really are to cracking the animal code. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis and S. bandensis) lack ears and voices, but they apparently make up for this with a kind of sign language. When shown videos of comrades waving their arms, they wave back.
Q: Why study cuttlefish?
Peter Neri, a computational neuroscientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and co-lead on the cuttlefish project: Cuttlefish are about as close to aliens as we’ll ever get. They’re invertebrates with astonishing behavioral complexity, and their [ability to] sense water vibrations works surprisingly like our own hearing. Our cochlear fluid and inner ear hair cells are essentially an adaptation of that same ancient system. In a way, we’re still carrying a bit of seawater in our heads.
Nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos) boast an astonishing vocal range, with individual repertoires of up to 200 distinct songs. These small, plain-looking birds reply to scientists’ artificial whistles by matching pitch and timing.
Q: How is AI helping decode nightingale songs?
Jan Clemens, a neurologist at the European Neuroscience Institute and co-lead on the nightingale project: Nightingale songs are built from unique syllables. Our AI system can group those syllables by sound structure, which would take months to do by hand. It’s opening up patterns we just couldn’t see before.
Q: How does this work for species that don’t vocalize?
Sophie Cohen-Bodénès, a behavioral biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and co-lead on the cuttlefish project: We first trained AI to detect color patterns on [cuttlefish] skin—spots, stripes, and camouflaging. That gave us the foundation to start decoding their gestures, too. Now, we’re using it to analyze wave signs and figure out what they might be saying with their arms.
Dolphins (Tursiops truncates) are renowned for their complex communication. They use “baby talk” with their calves and call one another with unique signature whistles—the equivalent of human names.
Q: Can AI help humans eavesdrop on these conversations?
Laela Sayigh, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and co-lead on the dolphin project: The [dolphins] we study in Florida have been tracked for decades. That gives us labeled recordings from known individuals, which is essential for figuring out whether their shared whistles might work like words. Right now we’re using AI to classify whistles, but we hope the algorithms will also help us track dolphins across the bay in near–real time, linking the sounds they make to where they are and who they’re with.
Cuttlefish wave back at other cuttlefish they see waving in videos.Sophie Cohen-Bodénès, Peter Neri
Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus)—rat-size New World monkeys—communicate in loud, high-pitched shrills, about as piercing as a smoke alarm at close range. Like dolphins, they appear to have “names,” signified by unique screeches.
Q: Are you finding evidence for anything like human communication in these animals?
David Omer, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and leader on the marmoset project: We’ve just started working on a language model for marmoset communication. The idea is to predict what call comes next based on the ones that came before—like how a machine-learning language model might predict the next word in a sentence. If we find consistent structure, that could hint at something grammarlike.
S.C.: We’re building a soft robotic arm that can perform the same gestures cuttlefish make. The idea is to let it “talk” to them through movement, and see whether they respond in real time—like a back-and-forth conversation in their own language.
Q: How close are we really to cracking animal language?
D.O.: If you mean full-on conversations, we’re not there. But if you mean meaningful, structured exchanges in the animal’s own world? That could be just a few years off.
Daniela Vallentin, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and co-lead on the nightingale project: I don’t think animals speak in sentences, but I do think they express ideas. “I’m here.” “I’m feeling good.” Or “I’m not.” That’s the level I think we’re close to understanding.
Q: Were there any moments in your research that made you stop and say, “Wait—did that just happen?”
L.S.: Male [dolphins] form pairs and call each other’s [signature] whistles if they get separated. But once, we were just testing our equipment and played one of those whistles while the pair was still together. They responded with a totally different whistle—one we hadn’t documented before. We’ve since heard it in other confusing situations. We call it the “WTF whistle,” because it really did seem like that’s what they were asking.
S.C.: Oh definitely. I was running our experiment with a smaller cuttlefish species, and one escaped into a big tank. I thought she was gone. But when I launched the experiment again—playing a video of wave signs—she came back, climbed onto a rock, stared at me, and started waving. It was like she knew what we were doing and wanted to join in.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/nheahxkn