Vocal communication in songbirds is impressive not only because of the number of vocalizations in their repertoire but also because of the flexible production and usage of these sounds. The imitation behavior observed for the song of the male bird has been the focus of a very large number of studies in the past 30 years. I will provide a historical and personal perspective of what we have learned by studying vocal imitation in songbirds and how this model system has provided multiple key findings in neuroscience. However, I will also argue that we have gained relatively few insights on mechanisms underlying key features of animal or human vocal communication. In our recent work, we have begun to address this discrepency. We are combining behavioral experiments, bioacoustical analyses, neurophysiological recordings and computational models to study the neural basis of the perception of all calls in the Zebra Finch repertoire in the context of communication. Zebra finches categorize call into their respective call types to produce appropriate approach or avoidance responses. Zebra finches are also able to recognize particular conspecifics from their vocalizations. We have deciphered the acoustic features that are essential for coding call type and caller ID. We have shown that individual recognition in zebra finches requires impressive auditory memories. We are studying high-level auditory areas to understand the neural computations that could lead to categorical responses for call types and specific learned responses to the idiosyncratic renditions of each call type produced by specific vocalizers. I will provide a brief overview of some of these results along with a more detailed description of our work on auditory memories and their role in individual recognition.