Researchers at the University of Washington recently unveiled a remarkable software tool known as DeepSqueak. The program can automatically identify, process, and sort rat and mouse squeaks. It might seem whimsical, but knowing what rodents are squeaking about could be extremely valuable to animal researchers.

Mice and rats are foundational to modern medical science. By one tally, mouse and rat studies have earned around 75 Nobel Prizes in health and physiology. Rats, in particular, are smart and communicative, and understanding their communication could add a useful data layer to countless studies. If a rat avoids tasty sugar water in an experiment, for example, is it demurring because it’s happily distracted or because it’s too anxious to take a drink?

Historically, studying rat calls has been difficult and impractical. Rats communicate largely in ultrasonic frequencies that human ears cannot process, and even with specialized microphones, tagging and categorizing squeaks in recordings is laborious at best.

DeepSqueak aims to change all that. Developed by researchers Russell Marx and Kevin Coffey at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the software uses sophisticated deep learning algorithms (hence the name “DeepSqueak”) to automatically pick rodent calls out of raw audio, compare them to calls with similar characteristics, and even look for patterns in the squeaks’ order. Not much is currently known about what all those squeaks mean, but Coffey hopes that once enough biologists compile enough calls, a sort of murine “Rosetta Stone” will emerge.

We at Verge Science can never resist a good animal study, so we decided to try DeepSqueak out for ourselves. After inviting a pet rat named Buddy into our studio for a squeak-recording session, we headed up to the University of Washington to see what we could learn from Buddy’s quiet chatter. Check out the video above to find out what happened.