PETALING JAYA: Anyone who lives with a dog or cat has probably wondered what exactly that bark, whine or indignant meow is supposed to mean. One bark may signal someone at the gate, another excitement, while a particular mewl might appear reliably five minutes before dinner.
Artificial intelligence is now being used to examine those sounds on a much larger scale, analysing thousands of vocalisations and identifying patterns that would be difficult for the human ear to detect.
Researchers at Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania say AI can already group recurring animal sounds and link them with behaviour or environmental context. Turning that into a genuine animal-to-human translator, however, is far more ambitious.
