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.
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