191–200 of 221 posts
I recall that the origin of the word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greeks, who interpreted foreign languages as simply "bar bar bar". So, other animals may be communicating vocally, it's just that all we hear is "woof woof woof".
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While maybe not very useful, it would be fun to have a real translation of dogs (and other animals). I have a lot of questions that I'd like them to answer.
In order to translate language, the animal has to be speaking language. That is, they have to be putting some sort of emotion or indicator into their vocalizations that would be able to be decoded in the first place. There's a channel on YouTube called BilliSpeaks where someone trained their cat to be able to press buttons to speak. The cat can answer questions, communicate feelings and even have conversations with t…
A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones! >Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms. >This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded tha…
Human exceptionalism has poisoned so many studies. My pet-theory why primates do not vocalize is that the neural difference is not even that cemented, it has to be some difference at the language acquiring stage as babys and children, were one human pattern matching center for sound fires constantly, acquiring the language "keys" and theirs dont. And it all cascades from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_…
On the other side: Parrots cannot recognize themselves in a mirror https://talkieparrot.com/behavior/can-parrots-recognize-them... , while monkeys can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test . I consider the mirror test a better test for a higher form of intelligence than simply being able to simulate talking. So the real question nowadays would be: Can GPT-4 pass the mirror test? Can it detect it‘s own output, if…
As for GPT-4 - it can't even recognize for itself whether data is good or bad, and it can't even recognize that it doesn't know something; IMO right now it's still basically just a black box that takes an input and produces a statistically matching output. A very good one, but still.
We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand. A few things we observed: 1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations 2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations 3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of sl…
Speaking of Dogs and Human interaction: I remember a study stating that wolfs lack a certain muscle, which dogs have. A muscle above the eye; believed to be directly linked to dogs’ long time interaction with humans.
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In order to translate language, the animal has to be speaking language. That is, they have to be putting some sort of emotion or indicator into their vocalizations that would be able to be decoded in the first place. There's a channel on YouTube called BilliSpeaks where someone trained their cat to be able to press buttons to speak. The cat can answer questions, communicate feelings and even have conversations with t…
What about communication between animals?
It would be nice if it were translatable, though.
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What about communication between animals?
My cats heavily use body language and physical activity to communicate with each other, rather than explicit vocalization. Their body language is passive, and their physical activity is indicative (and usually, so are their vocalizations); they don't exactly directly communicate concepts like human language does. It would be nice if it were translatable, though.
One use case I could see is storytelling, specifically to share events that one of the animals was not present for.
In my house, my dogs usually seem to 'communicate' by calling the other's attention, and then observing the same thing together. Maybe they'd like to tell stories for some of the things that one of them misses.
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My cats heavily use body language and physical activity to communicate with each other, rather than explicit vocalization. Their body language is passive, and their physical activity is indicative (and usually, so are their vocalizations); they don't exactly directly communicate concepts like human language does. It would be nice if it were translatable, though.
I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about. One use case I could see is storytelling, specifically to share events that one of the animals was not present for. In my house, my dogs usually seem to 'comm…
I haven't yet seen an example of it. I think pets learn to use the buttons to make requests or answer them, but they never do that with each other because they never really have any requests or answers for each other, if that makes any sense.
We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand. A few things we observed: 1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations 2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations 3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of sl…
I'm pretty sure I'm at least as much the trainee as the trainer here though.
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My chihuahua-pit mix has such a range I often describe it as “singing the songs of her people”. Anyway, what qualifies as speech is very subjective and generally anthropomorphic. I understand what my pup is saying almost all of the time, which wouldn’t qualify it as talking by most standards but it’s plain as day to me.
Haha, meanwhile my chihuahua-pit mix only communicates by trembling, booping, performative sneezing, huffing (as opposed to a woof), sometimes grumbling, and yelling at the mailman. Mostly trembles.
I was so amused, I always used to praise her for it. I'd say
> That's right, baby! Good job!! That was a good, family bark!!!
Chihuahuas are wildly underrated dogs. :)