
Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk (2016) - bschne
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-translate-bat-talk-and-they-argue-lot-180961564/
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grawprog
During my time studying bats we used anabat detectors [https://www.titley-
scientific.com/us/products/anabat-systems...](https://www.titley-
scientific.com/us/products/anabat-systems/anabat-sd2-bat-detector)

To record bat echolocation and visually analyze the waveforms to determine the
species and type of call. Different species echolocate at different
frequencies and the calls they make when they're travelling, searching for
prey and diving to eat all look different from each other and different
between species.

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axegon_
A bat translator could have been useful to me when a bat entered my flat at 3
a.m. a few weeks back...

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bschne
Human social behaviour is pretty solid evidence for the fact that merely
speaking the same language won't guarantee satisfactory conflict resolution
;-)

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axegon_
True. Still wouldn't hurt to try politely before opening the largest window
and tooling up a yoga mat and try baseball for the second time in my life. And
yes, now I do regret not filming it...

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AdamHede
Maybe off-topic, but the article says they used a modified machine learning
algorithm to nap bat calls to activities and from that developed a translator.

With the improvements to machine translation without parallelism data and
voices-to-voice translation, how stupid is the idea that we might someday be
able to take enough bat calls and human speech, and create a true translation
system? obviously assumes the bats got something vaguely resembling a language
we can translate from.

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pgreenwood
i.e., a bat phone.

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kwhitefoot
> not just random, as previously thought

Who would think that an animal would just make random noises?

That just ridiculous.

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ojhughes
They’re probably having a good laugh about how much better they dealt with
COVID-19 than us humans

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objektif
Ok now how do we start a civil war between them? Let them fight each other to
extinction.

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dcuthbertson
The bats around where I live, in the Northeastern US, eat a lot of mosquitoes.
I'd like them to stay around.

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eplanit
Sounds like bats need their own Twitter.

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bschne
This was actually posted on Marginal Revolution today with the exact preface
"Let's not give them twitter"

[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/he...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/hey-
thomas-nagel-bats-argue-a-lot-about-where-the-best-restaurants-are.html)

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senectus1
probably accusing each other of not wearing a mask :-P

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gHosts
I can just imagine the bat cave now..., "ROOOOBBIN!! You haven't taken out the
rubbish!"

"Nah! It was your turn you big bully!"

