House mice and many other species use ultrasonic vocalizations to communicate in various contexts including social and sexual interactions. These vocalizations are increasingly investigated in research on animal communication and as a phenotype for studying the genetic basis of autism and speech disorders. Several methods have been recently developed for automatically detecting and classifying USVs. In this work, the authors evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of these methods in a full, systematic comparison, while also presenting a new approach. Their new method, called BootSnap, outperformed the pretrained and retrained state-of-the-art tool, and thus it is more generalizable. Abbasi et al.

Image Credit: Bettina Wernisch, technical assistant at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna