However, I do think there is a path to some sort of translation to human languages. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words.
The _relationship_ between certain animal-language tokens may look close enough to the _relationship_ between certain human-language tokens to bridge the gap, even if both languages are entirely disconnected and we've never seen a direct translation between them.
There are already research groups who have been attempting to use embeddings and transformers to build out a vector space of specific animal languages. I think they will find some success and improve our current understanding, the question is how much context we will be able to derive. It's possible for example, that end-to-end multimodal AI would be able to train not just on animal sounds, but the body language and environmental and situational context they are in via video and other captured environmental data.
I would think largely not - particularly for mammals - it’s easy to think you have nothing in common with a shrew or a whale, but we are quite recent cousins, and much of our cognitive architecture and sensorium is the same.
That said, there could well be challenges and revelations beyond the obvious - for instance, can domesticated members of a species communicate with their wild cousins, or have they lost their culture/language? Cetaceans - do they talk in holograms? These are perhaps still obvious questions, but if it’s something we figure out, we may get answers to things we’ve never even considered asking.
Animal language doesn’t change much. Dogs sound pretty much the same as they did 10 years ago.
But AI generated sounds have changed rapidly in the past couple of years. In terms of music generation, sound to sound translation, and audio to text transcription.
Smart glasses might be able to leverage the process of LLMS to decipher a gesture or two of dog like behavior, but it also has to learn it from the that dog's own unique vocabulary.
It is different if a group of animals is socialized between themselves for a long duration and time. Why? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation You do not genetically pass down language. It has to be learned or made up.
However we've been training dogs to press buttons to express their needs and this is likely to come well before AI manages to establish LLMs around dog mannerisms.