Have you ever wondered what animals are talking about? With the development of AI, we may be able to understand their languages!

In Professor Karen Bakker’s new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, she talks about how AI is helping us to make an animal version（版本）.

All around the animal kingdom（王国）, there are sounds that we can hardly pick up and decipher（破译）. For example, elephants talk with each other using infrasound（次声波）far below our human hearing range. Coral（珊瑚）in the ocean also sends sound waves to attract baby coral to safer areas to grow. This is surprising as coral doesn’t have any ears! Scientists have placed listening equipment into these environments to pick up the sounds humans cannot hear.

After the sounds are recorded, AI can study their meaning. For example, Israeli researchers used AI to translate bats’ 15,000 calls. They found that more than 60 percent were arguments about four things: food, sleep positions（姿势）, invasion（侵犯）, and unwanted advances（求爱）.

This technology can not only understand the animals but communicate back to them. For example, bees use dances to communicate. A research team in Germany, therefore, put the bee language AI system into a robot bee. They asked the robot to create a dance routine（路线）to tell the bees where the nectar（花蜜）was, Vox reported.

In fifty years, everyone will live in a smart house(智慧型房屋). 【小题1】.

In the morning, your bed will “stand up” and wake you up. 【小题2】. After you wash your face and then go into the kitchen, your breakfast is ready. 【小题3】? The smart table does.

【小题4】. But you can still know what is happening in your house. Is there anyone visiting you? Does your dog do well alone at home? 【小题5】.

When you go back home in the evening, the lights will “know” and they will come on themselves.

What a cool house!

Electronic book is also called e-book. It is usually read on personal computers. Some mobile phones can also be used to read e-books.

Earlier e-books were written for a specific (特定的) group of readers and were about only a few subjects. With the development of the Internet, knowledge and answers to a lot of questions mainly come from e-books. This is why the e-book business is increasing quickly.

E-books have many advantages (优点). First, they save time. We don’t need to go to a bookstore to buy books, besides, we can find the topic we want on the Internet, and then we can quickly get many e-books on similar topics. Second, e-books save money. Some e-books cost a little money, and there are millions of e-books on the Internet that we can get for free. Last but not the least, e-books make reading more convenient. You can carry a whole library of hundreds of books with you in a small computer or any e-book reader without worrying about their weight.

But e-books have certain disadvantages. They need a personal computer or an e-book reader and the information can be lost if its file format (文件格式) is not supported or changed in the reader’s computer.

However, e-books provide us with a new way of reading. That is good.