In a major breakthrough in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Google is now developing an AI model that can understand and mimic how dolphins communicate with each other and even predict their “language.”
The major announcement was made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai on his official X account on Monday, wherein he claimed that the project name “DolphinGemma” will be rolled out in the summer season of 2025.
Introducing DolphinGemma, an LLM fine-tuned on many years of dolphin sound data
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) April 14, 2025to help advance scientific discovery. We collaborated with @dolphinproject to train a model that learns vocal patterns to predict what sound they might make next. It’s small enough (~400M params)…
Tech giant Google had collaborated with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Wild Dolphin Project to develop an AI model named DolphinGemma that can understand and mimic dolphin communication.
This project aims to communicate with dolphins by speaking their language in the ocean. He added that we will launch this model for scientific collaboration by this summer.
DolphinGemma is a new AI project being worked upon by Google to communicate with dolphins. The model has learned from 40 years and thousands of hours of recordings that were collected from dolphins in their natural habitats.
This AI model was trained to understand how dolphins communicate with each other through clicks, whistles, and fast sound patterns. The model can also recognize which sounds dolphins use while playing, exploring something new, or arguing. Furthermore, the model undergoes training to comprehend and replicate these sounds.
Dr. Thad Starner, an AI researcher with Google and Georgia Tech, said that, “When I first heard the sounds generated by the model, I danced around the room.” He further added that, “For years, I tried to produce burst pulses with regular software and couldn’t do it. But the model created them on its own, no lines of code, just from what it learned from the data.”
Dr. Denise Herzing, founder of the project, explained that, “The goal is to see if dolphins can learn or recognize a new word. Instead of spending 150 years manually analyzing all the recordings, the model allows us to detect patterns in days.”
The team has also created a device called CHAT that divers can wear underwater. This device uses AI to make dolphin-like sounds in real time.
Further, other projects worldwide are also using AI to communicate with animals, like the Earth Species Project, which studies crows, and CETI, which focuses on sperm whales.