Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins

Re:Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins by lars on Friday June 17, 2011 @12:01PM (#2665997)

From a machine learning perspective this doesn't seem like such a daunting task. We have pretty good speech recognition for human language (plus acceptable speech synthesis). Assuming dolphins have a smaller vocabulary than humans, speech recognition of dolphins should strictly speaking be a simpler problem (although it would be significantly harder to record the training data).

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Re:Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins by ChuckMcM on Friday June 17, 2011 @12:59PM (#2666221)

Of if dolphins have a sense of humor all bets are off.

Dophin 1, "Hey I bet we can get that thing to say 'bite me' when it greets someone!"

Dolphin 2, "You think? Ok, every time we meet in front of them you say 'bite me' and i'll say 'wheree?'"

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Re:Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins by stan_rogers on Friday June 17, 2011 @03:08PM (#2666685)

Oh, I'm sure there would be a few unfortunate "drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait until lunchtime" incidents, but with an automated Hungarian Phrasebook[1], we'll eventually learn to get by.

More to the point, though, we have no reason to assume that dolphins, any more than, say, apes, have the ability to "chat" -- to communicate about things displaced from the here and now. It's worth a go, of course, but our expectations shouldn't be too high going in.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao

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Re:Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins by pasbesoin on Friday June 17, 2011 @12:05PM (#2666014)

I think part of the problem may be context. Without swimming around with them, and having similar senses (something that these days some wearable sensors might mitigate), it may be difficult to grasp what they are talking about.

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Re:Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins by sebastianavina on Friday June 17, 2011 @12:04PM (#2666013)

the difference is to map the vocabulary to the meaning... even writig down the vocabulary is a challenge...

iiiiaiiiiaiiiiiiiiiaiiiIjii... in dolphin that means "WTF" or "Of course"?

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Re:Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins by pavel_lishin on Friday June 17, 2011 @12:58PM (#2666218)

Sure, but we start off already being fluent in the human language we're trying to write software for.

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