AI Trained on Birdsong Can Recognize Whale Calls
IEEE Spectrum AI
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Generative AI
AI Research
Birds’ chirps, trills, and warbles echo through the air, while whales’ boings, “ biotwangs,” and whistles vibrate underwater. Despite the variations in sounds and the medium through which they travel, both birdsong and whale vocalizations can be classified by Perch 2.0, an AI audio model from Google DeepMind. As a bioacoustics foundation model, Perch 2.0 was trained on millions of recordings of birds and other land-based animals, including amphibians, insects, and mammals. Yet researchers were surprised to learn how strongly the AI model performed when repurposed for whales.