Why, thanks to AI, you really could be Dr Dolittle and have a conversation with your pet

Forget mice. What elephants really don't like is a honey bee. Hardly surprising when you think about it: if you had a 6ft-long, highly sensitive nose and ears the size of bicycle wheels, you would hate getting stung too.

African honey bees are particularly savage, attacking in swarms of hundreds and pursuing their targets for up to a quarter of a mile. Naturally, when a family of elephants hears buzzing, they tend to stop whatever they're doing and turn tail.

Conservationists in Kenya are using this to protect the dwindling herds from humans. As farming communities expand, they come into conflict with wild elephants, which raid the newly planted fields to steal maize, melons and cassava.

Naturalist Dr Lucy King, at the Save The Elephants foundation in Nairobi, helps to run a scheme that places beehives along fences around farms. It's a simple, effective solution to prevent the animals coming into conflict with villagers (there's a sweet sideline for the farmers too: 'elephant-friendly honey').

But Dr King has made a far more extraordinary discovery – one that might eventually enable us to converse with elephants, and perhaps many other creatures, from whales to birds, thanks to the colossal processing power of artificial intelligence (AI).

Researchers at the cutting edge of AI tech believe that within a few years computer software will exist that not only helps us understand what animal noises mean but also gives us the power to talk back, just as we can now use translation apps on our smartphones to hold a conversation in any human language.

By recording and analysing the sounds elephants make when they hear bees, Dr King has been able to isolate one particular call.

It isn't a trumpet blast, or even a foghorn groan. It's more of a rumble, at such a low frequency that it's inaudible to human ears. Elephants can hear it for miles, though, and they know exactly what it means.

Dog Jip (Tom Holland) and Dr. John Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) in Dolittle, directed by Stephen Gaghan

Quite simply, elephants have a word for 'bees'.

Scientists are starting to discover that many animals emit noises in a way that's similar to human language, as Professor Hannah Fry learns on Wednesday in a half-hour episode of her BBC2 documentary series, The Future With Hannah Fry.

Prairie dogs use squeaks to describe what approaching predators look like. Budgies seem to have a language with both consonants and vowels.

Then there are elephant seals, which are not related to elephants. The largest of all seal species, weighing up to four-and-a-half tons, they are famously bad-tempered and not notably intelligent. But they also have evolved a limited kind of language.

Fresh from her appearance on The Celebrity Traitors, Professor Fry meets biologist Caroline Casey, who has been studying elephant seals on the Californian coast for more than a decade. By studying the bellows of the giant males with their rubbery noses, she has spotted a pattern hidden until now.

Each bull seal has its own distinctive call. One might make a sound like a bass drum; another emits a booming rat-a-tat – 'like bongos', as Professor Fry says.

Dr Casey's theory is that the seals are announcing their presence by shouting their own unique names. This alerts the females in their harem but also serves as a warning to other males who might have crossed their paths before.

'We don't know if they learn their names or if they're born with them,' admits Dr Casey. But the mere fact that elephant seals have names is hugely significant because it implies that they are aware of themselves and each other as individuals.

That is what psychologists call a 'theory of mind'. They are conscious of their own and others' existence. And if seals know it, why not all kinds of other large mammals? Far from being a uniquely human concept, it appears that many animals might share it.

This will be no surprise to dog and cat owners. Not all our pets are as clever as Cache, though. Professor Fry meets this five-year-old golden retriever at the home of her owner, Christina Lee, outside San Francisco, to see how the dog uses a 'language board' to communicate.

Scientists are starting to discover that many animals emit noises in a way that's similar to human language, as Professor Hannah Fry learns on Wednesday in a half-hour episode of her BBC2 documentary series, The Future With Hannah Fry

Laid out on electronic pads across the sitting-room floor, dozens of buttons enable Cache to signal words in English. Her favourites are 'walk', 'play' and 'bone', as well as 'mom' for Christina. No surprises there.

More intriguing, though, is the way Cache is able to chain words together by pressing buttons in turn: 'Want food' and 'Mom love you'. He can also indicate when he's feeling unwell by pressing the 'sick' button.

Scientists call this system 'augmentative interspecies communication'. And it doesn't require AI: a gorilla named Koko developed a vocabulary of more than 100 words using American Sign Language.

Koko, born in San Francisco zoo in 1971, lived at psychologist Penny Patterson's Gorilla Foundation for nearly 40 years until her death in 2018. She was able to invent names for objects by stringing together signs she already knew: a hairbrush was a 'scratch comb', and a ring was a 'finger bracelet'.

Ice cream was 'my cold cup'. Nectarine yogurt, her favourite, was 'orange flower sauce'. And since Koko knew she wasn't human, she described herself as a 'fine person gorilla'. When Dr Patterson asked her what death was, Koko replied: 'Trouble old... comfortable hole bye... sleep.'

She became a celebrity attraction. The comedian Robin Williams spent an hour rolling around the floor of her trailer, tickling her until the two of them were in hysterics. Star Trek's William Shatner and rock stars Sting and Peter Gabriel were also visitors.

It seems impossible that a gorilla could communicate via signing in a sophisticated way, unless language was already an innate ability. It certainly appears to be instinctive for many widely different species.

Humpback whales sing, performing underwater concerts that can last more than an hour, and their songs are passed from one whale to another. Each year, the music seems to change and evolve but scientists have no idea yet what they are saying.

Birdsong is thought to be a means of establishing territory and attracting a mate. But that doesn't explain why sparrows chatter in bushes and swifts shriek as they wheel through the sky, chasing insects. Could they also be communicating?

One major obstacle for AI scientists is the lack of recorded data. The software for chatbots such as ChatGPT was developed from trillions of written words culled (generally without permission) from books, newspapers and the internet. That vast archive of language does not exist for animal calls.

And even if superintelligent computers can decode the mathematical patterns that might underlie whale song or elephant rumbles, it might not be wise to start broadcasting in their own languages. Animals might be deeply confused and distressed if we start talking to them.

One scientist tells Professor Fry that we urgently need a 'Geneva Convention for Cross-Species Communication', to prevent irresponsible humans from filling the animal airwaves with fake news and gibberish.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't chat away to our pets. A 2021 study by neuroscientists at Dalhousie University in Canada showed the average pet dog understands nearly 90 words, while cats are thought to recognise up to 50 words. It doesn't really matter what you say, though. Tone matters much more. Using a gentle, affectionate voice stimulates oxytocin, the hormone that increases bonding.

One thing is certain. If AI does ever teach us to understand what cows, pigs and chickens are talking about, a lot of people will be going vegetarian. How could you eat an animal after you've heard it pleading for its life?