Not a good analogy.
Daniel Jackson actually could read and speak ancient Egyptian. He used it to figure what a stargate is and how it might work.
Powerful AI is at the moment needed, because we have no real clue how to do it otherwise.
The basic is vector analysis. It is bottom line just finding of substrings in longer strings. For example, find
"aos" in "chaos".
Unfortunately regarding long strings of animal sound, we usually do not know the underlying alphabet, and do not figure that "aos" is interesting, and try searching for it in other strings.
The AI systems that are trained for that, however can analyze thousands of "songs", and figure out the words and the alphabet, and decide about what they have no clue yet.
So what the AI would do is figuring that "chaos" and "albatros" and "trousers" have a similar signature somewhere which is abbreviated "aos", and the other fragments of the words are so far meaningless, or can not be identified as reoccurring pattern.