Blog

Ethologists and bioacousticians are constantly battling noise, from the sound of wind or rain or even the animals’ own movements, drowning out the vocalizations they’re trying to analyze. We introduce a new method, Biodenoising, to address these challenges by denoising animal vocalizations without requiring clean data.

NatureLM-audio analyzes complex animal vocalizations across thousands of species with simple, natural language prompts. With state-of-the-art performance on novel benchmarks, it tackles bioacoustics tasks like species classification, life-stage prediction, and even audio captioning, opening up powerful new possibilities for animal communication research.

Reid Hoffman and Waverley Street Foundation grants will drive significant AI-fueled animal communication breakthroughs and catalyze a deeper connection to the natural world

Sara Keen, Senior Research Scientist in Behavioral Ecology and AI, reflects on a pivotal gathering at the Santa Fe Institute titled “Animals in Translation: Creating Criteria and Frameworks for Decoding Communication in Other Species.” Joined by a diverse group of researchers, writers, and artists, the event aimed to define standards for successfully deciphering non-human communication…

Senior AI Research Scientist Masato Hagiwara announces the release of BirdAVES—a series of self-supervised animal vocalization encoder models specifically designed for birds. BirdAVES achieves a remarkable 20+% improvement in performance across bird-related datasets and tasks compared to the previous AVES model. ‍

We’re thrilled to announce that we have just received significant new funding of $1.2 million from the Paul G Allen Family Foundation to support development of technologies that will reconnect us to nature.

ESP Senior Research Scientists Benjamin Hoffman and Maddie Cusimano announce the release of Voxaboxen, a new machine learning tool for research in bioacoustics. Based on Earth Species Project’s bioacoustics foundation model AVES, Voxaboxen is designed to detect and classify animal vocalizations in recorded audio, with the high level of temporal specificity that is required for…

While scientists have been studying the behavior and communication of other species for decades, the use of AI to help accelerate these discoveries is relatively new. In partnership with FootPrint Coalition (FPC), Robert Downey Jr’s initiative to accelerate technologies for sustainable abundance, and the Experiment Foundation, ESP is thrilled to announce the launch of a…

Sara Keen, Senior Researcher, Behavioral Ecology and AI reflects on how machine learning can help us find the signals in the noise and decipher meaning from the world of invisible information that surrounds us.

We provide an overview of ESP’s technical roadmap – offering a path forward for our proposed and ongoing scientific work, which is focused on using AI to decode non-human animal communication.