Talk to Animals App: Whales Have 'Vowels', Translators Don't

You can ask a cheetah why it sleeps about 12 hours a day, and it answers as a cheetah. It isn't 18 hours, as the popular claim goes. That number doesn't hold up: the Queensland Brain Institute and Cincinnati Zoo both put cheetahs at about 12. The cat that really sleeps the day away is the lion, at about 20.

Animal 'facts' bend as they spread, so the answers in a talk to animals app need to come from real biology. AnimalDex's answers do, and the app is blunt about its limits: "No app can decode what an individual animal is saying, and anyone claiming to is selling a trick."

So nothing is being translated. The species answers in the first person, working from what science knows about it, and tells you which parts are fact and which are AnimalDex's interpretation. It can't tell you what one particular cat meant by one particular chirp.

Further down you'll find how to talk to any of more than 2,500 animals, step by step. First, here is where the real race to decode animal language stands, from a 27-gram collar to a chatty whale grandmother called Pinchy.

A 27-gram collar from China claims to translate your pet with 94.6% accuracy. The PettiChat runs sounds through Alibaba's Qwen language model, and it took more than 10,000 pre-orders at 799 yuan, about US$118 each. Shipping is promised for the last quarter of 2026.

That 94.6% comes from the maker alone. Meng Xiaoyi, the company behind the collar, was founded in January 2026, and no peer-reviewed study backs the number. The tech site HotHardware called its demo videos "undeniably choreographed".

Independent research cited by IBTimes UK in its report on the collar is far more modest. AI working from sounds alone picks the right broad mood roughly 57% of the time. Adding video and body posture raises that to about 89–92%, but only in controlled settings and only for broad emotional states.

Here is the line that belongs on every translator box: no published study has turned animal sounds into human-language sentences. When your domestic dog barks at 3am, the best any machine can offer is a guess at its mood. It can't give you a message.

domestic dog

Sperm whales seem to have vowels. Project CETI researchers sped up the whales' click patterns and cut out the silences between them. Inside, they found two vowel-like sounds that work like our "a" and "i". Sometimes a whale glides from one to the other, like the vowel in "cow", and the "a" sounds last much longer than the "i" sounds.

A CETI analysis first revealed the vowels in November 2025. The full study appeared on 14 April 2026 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, based on more than 1,100 codas from a wild group of 15 females and calves off Dominica. One of its stars is Pinchy, "a particularly vocal grandma" in National Geographic's words.

CETI's linguistics lead, Gašper Beguš, previously studied ancient languages such as Hittite, Tocharian and Sanskrit, and he is a fan of Pinchy: "She's very chatty, she's very structured... She's the best."

The groundwork came in May 2024. MIT CSAIL and CETI published a sperm whale "phonetic alphabet" in Nature Communications, built from 9,000 codas that the Dominica Sperm Whale Project recorded with D-tags attached to the whales. The click bursts vary in rhythm, tempo, rubato (stretched timing) and ornamentation (extra clicks), and those parts combine into a large repertoire.

The way the whales produce these sounds is strange too. Sperm whales use "phonic lips" in their noses that vibrate like our vocal cords, and they have the largest brains of any known animal. MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus said the findings "challenge the prevailing belief among many linguists that complex communication is unique to humans." Lead author Pratyusha Sharma compared the work to contacting an alien species.

There are important limits. CETI founder David Gruber says the whales have "independently evolved a very vowel-like system", but that reading is contested and the field is young. Nobody has decoded what a single sound means, and the team's next step is "to decipher the meaning." Robert Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the 2024 study, praised its "new, tantalizing details", carefully.

Whale sounds have changed history before. Roger Payne's 1971 Science paper on humpback whale song, "Songs of Humpback Whales", helped spark the Save the Whales movement and build public support for the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Sperm whales seem to have vowels. Nobody knows yet what they mean.

Marmoset monkeys call each other by name. A Hebrew University team reported in Science on 29 August 2024 that the common marmoset uses "phee-calls" to address specific individuals. Each monkey can also tell when a call is meant for it.

Before that study, the only animals with strong evidence of name-like calls were humans, dolphins and elephants. The list now has four members, and one of them is a small monkey.

Findings like this are why the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University created a Turing test for animals. The Coller Dolittle Grand Prize offers a US$10 million equity investment or US$500,000 in cash. It goes to the first team whose animal communicates with researchers on its own without recognising they are human. Entries must be non-invasive, use the animal's own signals, work in more than one context and show a measurable response.

Until someone wins the grand prize, there is an annual prize of US$100,000. The 2026 finalists, announced on 4 June 2026, worked with zebra finches (UC Berkeley), African striped mice whose ultrasonic calls encode group identity (Saint-Étienne/EPHE), chimpanzees (CNRS Lyon and the Taï Chimpanzee Project) and bonobos (Zürich and Harvard). The bonobos combine calls in ways where the meaning depends on the combination, a building block of grammar.

There is a prize of up to US$10 million for the first team whose animal chats with humans without realising they're human.

common marmoset

You don't need to find a sperm whale to talk to one. Here is how to start a conversation with any of more than 2,500 animals.

1. Pick or scan your animal. Scan a real animal with the AnimalDex camera, or open any species in the app or on the website.

2. Tap the floating "Speak to" button on its card. On the cheetah's card, it reads "Speak to the Cheetah".

3. Type anything, or tap a suggested opener. The openers point straight at the moments when the animal's strategy works and the moments when it breaks down. The animal replies in the first person.

4. Check the labels. The animal tells you which parts of its answer are biology and which are AnimalDex's interpretation.

Before every reply, the server loads that species' record. That includes its field guide (habitat, diet, predators, lifespan, where to look), its Animal Power and the lesson behind it, and its stats, Trials and qualities. It also loads how the animal behaves: the states it switches between, what triggers them, how its strategy fails, and where that pattern shows up in business and relationships. In AnimalDex's words, "The biology is fact; the voice is AnimalDex's interpretation of it."

Then comes the strange part: the animals share what they learn about you. Mention to the wolf that you run a bakery, and the cheetah knows it next week, in a brand-new chat. Memory is kept per account and stores short facts, not transcripts. If you've never used the scanner, the capture animals app hub explains how the camera works.

Tell the wolf you run a bakery and the cheetah knows it next week.

capture animals app

Yes. AnimalDex's own FAQ answers "Is talking to animals free?" with one word: "Yes." Free accounts get 30 messages a day in the app, and Pro gets 100. On the website you get a few messages a day without an account, and more when you sign in.

Vague questions get vague answers. Bring a cheetah a real decision, habit or work problem and it answers from its Power, the survival strategy its species has evolved. Then it does something most advice won't: it tells you where that strategy would let you down. You can also put the same problem to two very different species and compare. For a team problem, try a species from the animals that work together list.

It won't diagnose you or act as your therapist, and the memory skips health and finances on purpose. You need an account to save your captures, credits and progress. Only photos taken live with the in-app camera join your collection; uploaded photos never do.

animals that work together

The best conversations start with a real animal in front of you. In the Masai Mara, which is home to both cheetahs and lions, a lion that lies flat out in the grass all afternoon is simply doing what lions do for about 20 hours a day. The cheetah, on its 12-hour schedule, gives you far more waking time to watch.

Closer to home, any animal counts: a garden bird, a street cat, a dog in the park. Keep your distance and open the scanner. Photograph the animal live with the AnimalDex camera and confirm, and AnimalDex identifies it, grades the capture and adds it to your collection. Then tap "Speak to" and ask about what you just watched it do.

If you want one question to start with, open the marmoset and ask about names. The Hebrew University team found that marmoset families have dialects: relatives use similar sound features to make different names. Even unrelated adults pick up the family style.

Masai Mara