Giving Voice to the Voiceless
Giving Voice to the Voiceless A Call for AI Research in Animal Communication An open letter to the world’s leading AI research teams on why decoding animal language could be the next great frontier of empathy and science. To the Research Teams at Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity and xAI I write to you not as a scientist or technologist, but as someone who has spent thousands of hours listening—truly listening—to the dogs in my life. In those hours of barks, whines, tail wags, and sighs, I’ve learned something profound: animals are not voiceless. We simply haven’t learned their language yet. The Opportunity Before Us Your organizations are pioneering the most advanced language models humanity has ever created. You’ve taught machines to understand and generate human language with remarkable sophistication. But there’s another frontier that remains largely unexplored: the languages of the animals who share our world. Imagine a future where: A ...