Fancy talking to a dodo? AI project lets you ask museum exhibits about their lives

If the pickled bodies, partial skeletons and stuffed carcasses that fill museums seem a little, well, quiet, fear not. In the latest coup for artificial intelligence, dead animals are to receive a new lease of life to share their stories - and even experiences of the afterlife.

- Ian Sample

More than a dozen exhibits, ranging from an American cockroach and the remnants of a dodo to a stuffed red panda and a fin whale skeleton, will be granted the gift of conversation tomorrow for a month-long project at Cambridge University's Museum of Zoology.

Equipped with personalities and accents, the dead creatures and models can converse by voice or text through visitors' mobile phones. The technology allows the animals to describe their time on Earth and the challenges they faced, in the hope of reversing apathy towards the biodiversity crisis.

“Museums are using AI in a lot of different ways, but we think this is the first application where we're speaking from the object's point of view,” said Jack Ashby, the museum's assistant director. “Part of the experiment is to see whether, by giving these animals their own voices, people think differently about them. Can we change the public perception of a cockroach by giving it a voice?”