What jumbo tells dumbo

What do elephants and humans have in common? According to Marquette University´s Patrick Clemins, individuals in both species have distinct voices, and we can train computers to recognize 85 percent of what they say. Running preidentified elephant sounds into a PC-based hidden Markov model (HMM) algorithm trains that program to then recognize and classify further elephant recordings. In short, combine a herd of six elephants´ a digital tape deck, and a basic workstation running an HMM, and you get the start of a great conversation. The software´s accuracy not only bests human efforts for elephant speech, but it´s also comparable with the same task - using the same approach and software - done on human speech.