I'm glad this research is being done. Decoding other species languages is the first step towards true inter-species communication. We are quite far away from realizing this, but one day we will get there.To learn more about bat vocalizations, the researchers housed a colony for 75 days and recorded bat sounds and movements on video, capturing 15,000 vocalizations in all. They fed the sounds to a voice-recognition system normally used for human voice analysis configured to work on bat sounds and used it to pull out any meaning that might exist. The VR system was able to connect certain sounds made by the bats to certain social situations and interactions that could then be tied to interactions seen in the video. The researchers grouped the sounds into four main groups: arguing over food, mating and sleeping clusters, and differences of opinion regarding how close was too close when hanging around each other in the colony.
I can't wait for the first fully translated conversation between a human and another species. I can only imagine what they will have to say to us.