For years it’s been known that dolphins are highly intelligent animals – remember Ecco the dolphin? – as their brains are actually bigger than a human’s and they have a special way of communicating with each other. Now a startup is looking to find out more about this fascinating creature by figuring out what they say to each other.

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Gavagai is a Swedish company that is looking to analyse dolphin sounds over the next four years in an attempt to develop an algorithm that can translate these noises into words. The company has already spent tens of millions of pounds developing algorithms for different human language so they kinda know what they are doing. But this dolphin task is set to be even harder than usual, as it’s really complex and totally different to human language.

However, Gavagai CEO Lars Hamberg is still confident they’ll be able to make the breakthrough:

The technology models meaning instead of structure. It is unsupervised, and it continuously learns meaning by itself, by observing every language’s usage – much like a human.

The technology is based on many years of world-leading research and members of the project group have done extensive research on cats, bird and other animals.

As such and outcome which allows us to communicate with and understand dolphins is very realistic with recent advances in science and technology, specifically in language AI.

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He certainly sounds confident – imagine if in four years you would be able to communicate effectively with dolphins. How nuts would that be? Totally something I never thought I would be able to experience in my lifetime.

Until then, the research is going to be compiled by observing bottlenose dolphins at wildlife park Kolmården’s dolphinarium in Norrköping, southern Sweden. Can’t wait to see how this turns out in 2021. Set a reminder.

If they’re in any doubt though, they should probably hit up this guy who had sex with and fell in love with a dolphin. Sure he knows a thing or two.