A Chinese startup recently claimed to have engineered the holy grail of communication by piercing the human-animal language barrier. Meng Xiaoyi’s artificial intelligence device proposes to translate dog and cat noises for pet parents with “up to 95 percent accuracy”. But the scientific community has rightly remained sceptical. In such a contested space, neuroscientist Julie Elie’s recent win of the $1,00,000 Coller-Dolittle prize for interspecies understanding is all that more noteworthy. Elie studied the vocalisations of zebra finches, birdsongs that artist Richard Long had incorporated into his artwork decades ago. The real pathbreaker would be winning the grand $10-million prize offered by the same foundation for cracking two-way interspecies communication. Any takers from India in this AI age?
