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By Amanda Greenwood
Associate News Editor
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Scientists are using AI to help research and decode the calls of zebra finches, a small, highly social songbird, native to Australia, that uses a range of calls to communicate with one another. This research could potentially help establish two-way communication between humans and animals.
Julie Elie, an associate project scientist in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent more than a decade studying how zebra finches communicate. Her work has helped to identify roughly 11 types of calls used by the birds to communicate information to each other, including hunger, danger, and social conflict, as well as to establish contact and bond with other birds.
Experiments showed that zebra finches appear to distinguish their 11 calls based on what they mean as well as how they sound. The birds were more likely to confuse calls with similar meanings than calls that simply sounded alike.
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The results suggest that zebra finches understand what different calls mean, rather than simply recognizing how they sound.
"As long as call-types have clearly different meanings for the birds, they are very well distinguished even if their acoustics are quite similar," Elie told UC Berkeley News. She said the pattern of mistakes provided evidence that the birds have a "mental representation of the meaning" of their calls.
These findings could provide some of the key building blocks needed for eventual two-way communication.
Newsweek has contacted Elie for comment and is awaiting a response.
Could Humans Actually Talk to Birds?
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If researchers can reliably establish what particular calls mean to birds, technology, such as AI, could be used to recognize those signals. Ultimately, it could produce calls that the birds will understand—potentially enabling two-way conversations between humans and animals.
Although this breakthrough hasn’t happened just yet, the research has been recognized for its potential to help humans communicate with animals. Elie won the 2026 Coller Dolittle Prize for Two-way Interspecies Communication for her research decoding zebra finch vocalizations. The $100,000 annual prize recognizes research that could help scientists develop technology that is capable of communicating with animals.
How Was AI Used in the Research?
Elie and her team combined more than a decade of behavioral observations with machine learning and AI to put the different zebra finch sounds into categories, effectively building a vocabulary of their "core words." Researchers then tested whether those categories made sense to the birds themselves.
UC Berkeley says Elie was able to compile an audio dictionary connecting particular call types with meanings including hunger, distress, alarm, and a need to make contact. She then tested the dictionary through experiments in which birds were rewarded for correctly completing vocalization-classification tasks.
However, while AI could distinguish between the calls by analyzing their sound patterns, the birds appeared to understand what those calls actually meant.
For example, AI might identify differences in pitch or rhythm between two calls. But the zebra finches' responses suggested they were also responding to the meaning behind them, such as whether a call related to danger, hunger, or social contact.
This means AI alone cannot tell researchers what the birds are communicating. Observing their behavior is also important. Scientists need to consider when a bird makes a particular sound, what is happening around it, and how other birds respond to determine what the call means.
For now, AI is helping researchers analyze bird communication that humans have struggled to understand. But evidence that birds themselves categorize calls according to meaning could bring scientists a step closer to the more ambitious goal of not just understanding animals, but eventually communicating back.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and James Debens
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