Scientists claim to have created an AI program that can decipher pigs’ speech, which could soon allow humans to communicate with the animals.
According to researchers, the program can decode pig sounds and may be able to warn farmers about unpleasant emotions, albeit it’s not quite Doctor Doolittle.
The tool is intended to enhance animal wellbeing.
To create the system, the researchers—who came from universities in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France, Norway, and the Czech Republic—used thousands of recorded pig sounds from various situations.
They discovered that grunts, oinks, and squeals indicate either pleasant or negative emotions in scenarios involving play, isolation, and competition for food.
Elodie Mandel-Briefer, a behavioral biologist at the University of Copenhagen and the study’s co-leader, claims that although animal emotions are crucial to their welfare, they are rarely measured on farms.
According to the study, pigs raised on outdoor, free-range, or organic farms where they were allowed to walk around and dig in the ground made fewer stress cries than pigs raised in conventional settings.
In order to assist consumers in making educated decisions, researchers believe that this technique may one day be applied to label farms.
