Title: How AI is revealing the language of the birds
Author: nature video

Transcript:
[Music]
they surprise us every time we try to
look at something we find something new
they are so similar to us they have this
Society where they which the basic unity
is a
[Music]
family carry and crows are found
throughout the world and they are
intelligent adaptable animals and they
normally live a fairly solitary
lifestyle either alone or in
pairs but in Northern Spain the crows
are different these Crows form family
groups that stick together The Offspring
stay with their parents for H up to four
years actually they share the natural
territory they stay together on the Nal
territory H and they form these stable
family groups what they do while they
stay on the netal territory with their
parents is H help them with the new
Offspring in the following spring so
they cooperate in h tasks like chick
provisioning territorial defense
defending the nest the chicks and and
providing them for food for The
Offspring is a kind of Haven they are
tolerated they have a safe place to stay
because the parents uh look for
predators and defend the territory
against Predators they have food um so
they have a really nice place like
Italian uh aspring uh they stay very
well at home with Mom that prepared the
food and uh and clean the house these
researchers established that this
unusual social behavior was not
genetically driven but rather it was
learned and the shared responsibilities
required some degree of
coordination it became clear that the
team would need to better understand how
the crows were
communicating to collect data on
vocalizations we used um a small
electronical device called bioger it has
got a microphone and an accelerometer
and a magnetometer so the microphone
records the vocalizations and the
accelerometer and magnetometers record
the movements of the bird hopefully we
will use the data from this device not
only to um
analyze vocalizations but also to use
the movement data to know what the crows
were doing at the time of the
vocalization so we attached all this
stuff on the
crow using a piece of balloon like this
one and this is because the balloon
degradates uh with time in about three
weeks a month a month and the half and
eventually H breaks down and drops
this provides the team with plenty of
data The Next Step was to sort through
it I'm doing the cheeks vocalization I
mean uh what kind of information may
pass between vocalization of the cheeks
to the ad have the sounds spectrogram
with the sounds and in this part here is
a table where I annotate the different
sounds so H here this works we play it
and we hear a
sound and then if we think it's a cheap
vocalization we annotate for
example that one is the cheeks SW wind
food that they do really loud noise one
of the first things the researchers
discovered was that the crows often make
softer sounds that are only audible up
close the very interesting thing is that
they use this kind of soft calls a lot
uh they have a a large amount of very
pretty similar uh similar soft calls and
they are talking to each other all the
time um they also have this long distant
C which are the call typically known for
Crows so if I ask you what's what a crow
does and you will
say but that is quite rare actually most
of the time they just do
some some sounds like
this these softer calls could prove to
be a rich source of information but also
increases the volume of data that the
researchers have to deal with enter the
Earth species project a group who are
using the work from the University of
Lyon to build an artificial intelligence
that can analyze and sort the hundreds
of thousands of vocalizations collected
by the team what you can see here is the
big cloud of crow vocal ations and the
initial classification of coal that has
been done by the artificial intelligence
right now I'm collaborating with
Victoria Nela with the the
classification process I listen through
uh the the different piles uh within and
um I go through all of the sounds and I
uh put them inside one of the these
existing piles and if um then we come
together and agree on a a new
classification if the the sounds are
unique enough we put them into a
different category or if we can decide
to sometimes merge two categories which
are very similar for example take a look
at some of the very unique vocalizations
that we have come across where the there
are sounds that we can't really pin down
and put anywhere else so there's some
really Unique Sounds here for
example and this is probably one of my
favorites
which is you wouldn't expect a cow to be
able to make a sound such as
this this is just a preliminary work
once we have done this possible virtual
repertoire that makes sense for us we
must go to the field and see if they
makes sense for Crows so did will open a
phase of a uh experimentation in the
field that which will be I think very
fascinating and and interesting and try
to see if what we think uh there are
different calls actually means different
things for the for the
animals from whales to elephants AI is
increasingly being used to shed light on
animal communication and this team hopes
that their program may do the same for
Crows providing them with a unique
insight into how they build these family
groups and maybe giving us a way to
communicate in some basic way with these
beautiful birds