AI Trained on Birdsong Can Recognize Whale Calls

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 . Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research have been studying whale bioacoustics for almost a decade, with work including algorithms that can detect humpback whale calls , as well as a more recent multispecies whale model that can identify eight distinct species and multiple calls for two of those species. But with the release of Perch 2.0,…