I have been studying crow vocalizations for over 30 years. A number of years ago, I wrote the book, The Language of Crows and created a CD of crow vocalizations and their meanings to go with it. The discussion in that book still remains the most thorough analysis of crow language yet to be published. Since then I have continued working using machine learning techniques, as well as continual observations of wild crow populations. I have been following with great interest the attempts to use Artificial Intelligence to "translate" the sounds made by a variety of sentient creatures - whales, elephants, etc. - and have come to the conclusion that this is one area where AI can at best, only achieve limited success.
With crows, the "calls" we hear may be reasonably compared to the bugle calls used by the military. With a very limited range of possible sounds, a bugler can relay a very large number of concrete directives - wake up, come eat, attack the enemy, retreat, go to bed, etc. It is very simple to correlate these sounds with the accompanying activities by simple observation. It would be a piece of cake for AI to handle. This is pretty much what all the recent AI studies have been accomplishing with for whales, etc. However, dropping back to the military analogy, and assuming that other species besides humans engage in vocalizations that go beyond simple action related statements, it is easy to tell when the bugle calls soldiers to the mess hall, but an entirely different matter to decipher what they are talking about over dinner if we don't already know the language.
Over the years, I have recorded many crow vocalizations, particularly in winter communal roosts at nightfall, that I am convinced fall into the category of "conversation" as opposed to action related "calls." After many years of eavesdropping on crows during their daily routines, I can pretty much tell what most of their calls are describing. The much lower volume communications during the day between individual birds and the evening roost group conversations remain as indecipherable as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the absence of a Rosetta Stone. Some entirely novel approaches will have to be developed in the field of xenolinguistics if ever we are to have meaningful conversations with members of our fellow species here on earth, let alone with other intelligent species we may encounter if and/or when we expand beyond the boundaries of our planet. [Michael Westerfield]
https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1465065378/the-language-of-crows-the-crowsnet-book
