Project CETI

Project CETI is an international initiative to understand the acoustic communication of sperm whales using advances in artificial intelligence. The project has an interdisciplinary scientific board including marine biologists, artificial intelligence researchers, roboticists, theoretical computer scientists, and linguists. Its name, Cetacean Translation Initiative, is a reference to the SETI Institute. The project has a base on the island of Dominica where recordings are being collected. Off the coast of Alaska, CETI succeeded in the first intentional human-whale interaction in humpback whale "language". The organization has been selected as a TED Audacious Project. CETI researchers have identified 156 distinct codas and their basic components, a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" much like phonemes.