AI gives voice to 150-year-old tree in Dublin, enabling real-time interaction with humans

In a pioneering experiment, a researcher has merged nature with artificial intelligence to give voice to a 150-year-old chestnut tree in Dublin, enabling it to reflect on its existence and engage with visitors. The visionary project was conceived by Evan Greally, Head of Creative Tech and Innovation at Droga5 Dublin, a part of Accenture Song.

Hyderabad: We have come across talking trees in our mythological stories and movies but couldn’t even fathom that possibility in real life. However, in a groundbreaking experiment, a researcher has blended nature and the power of AI to give voice to a 150-year-old chestnut tree in Dublin, which now is able to reflect on its own existence and even interact with visitors.

The innovative project is the brainchild of Evan Greally, Head of creative tech and innovation at Droga5 Dublin, part of Accenture Song.

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According to reports and interviews that have appeared across multiple news platforms in the last few weeks, Evan Greally’s experiment collects real-time environmental data, including bioelectrical signals, wind speed, and soil moisture, collected through sensors that are connected to the Chestnut tree at various locations.

The information collected through these sensors are then fed into a localized large language model (LLM), which gives the tree its own unique personality, voice and even agency, which is far more evolved that mere routine chatbot interactions, various reports said.

Utilizing the LLM model, the Chestnut tree just doesn’t answer like a chatbot but it contemplates life, responds to its environment, surroundings and even verbally interacts with people.

This ambitious project evolved from a smaller experiment involving a mint plant named Eight, where bioelectrical signals were used to enable basic communication. Inspired by this initial success and a collaboration with Agency for Nature (an initiative by Purpose Disruptors), Greally and his team at Droga5 Dublin scaled up the concept, selecting the ancient horse chestnut tree in Morden Hall Park for this unique endeavor.

Interacting with an online creative platform Little Black Book (LLB), Evan Greally was quoted as “What if a plant could talk? So, we wired up a mint plant, fed its bioelectrical signals into a model, and suddenly, it could communicate. That little experiment got people thinking differently about nature – not as something passive, but something interactive. Then, a team in our Droga5 London office saw an opportunity to take it further through a collaboration with Agency for Nature, an initiative founded by Purpose Disruptors. That’s how we went from our little mint plant Eight, to a 150-year-old horse chestnut tree in Morden Hall Park.

“But beyond scale, the real experiment was this: What happens when you give an LLM an understanding of self? Instead of responding to human prompts, the AI was driven entirely by the tree – its stress levels, its environment, its experience. The tree wasn’t just given a voice. It had agency,” he said.

Trees react to their environment, but we don’t fully understand how. We had to research how bioelectrical signals behave and let the LLM help the tree make sense of them, translating its responses into something we could actually understand.”

The technical complexities also included running the AI processing, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech functionalities locally on a Mac Mini M4, without cloud computing. Furthermore, a significant creative challenge was ensuring the tree’s voice felt authentic – ancient, reflective, and perhaps even a little cryptic.

To learn more about the Talking Tree: https://lbbonline.com/news/giving-trees-a-voice-how-ai-and-nature-collided-in-droga5s-talking-tree?