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BirdNet – Identify Birds by Sound
- gadders 5y agoGreat application.
- mandmandam 5y agoI've found this to be a lovely app. It doesn't seem to have all the birds I'd like, but the way it organizes information and the general smoothness is exemplary.
- r_singh 5y agoI've been able to spot over 50 types of birds (including Great Hornbill, Rufous Necked Hornbill, Greater Flameback) in Goa this monsoon with the help of this app (it discovered over 120 unique species, but they were hard to spot), even though it was not made for South Asia Apart from the usefulness of the app, interface and usability is great too
- Razengan 5y agoSee also: Merlin Bird ID, powered by recordings and sightings in Macaulay Library and eBird. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/id773457673 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/...
- 123pie123 5y agothanks, I was going to try it, but for some reason that application needs access to my contacts
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoYou can share your "life list" of bird sightings. Optional, but permissions get shown at install time instead of at use time.
- anyonecancode 5y agoI have the app and do like it, but my phone's camera quality doesn't seem good enough for this to work properly (iPhone 6). I have to get pretty lucky and be able to be super close to the bird so that very little zooming or image enlargement is needed. Still, nice app as a field guide.
- techterrier 5y agoIm a huge fan of what they are doing at Cornell! hope im not contravening the rules too much by plugging my current project Birda - 'Strava for Birdwatching' https://birda.org/ https://birda.org/
- genki_af 5y agoShould have called it skynet
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoCornell has some really great resources. I haven’t tried using this particular one. It has its work cut out for it. Bird calls are difficult. A mockingbird or catbird can sound exactly like a sparrow or finch. I remember, in the 1990s, when everyone had Nokia bricks, that mockingbirds would sometimes copy the ringtones.
- mjhoy 5y agoThe mockingbirds and catbirds I’ve heard are easy to identify, not from a particular sound but from how they string sounds together. It seems to me they copy notes, but not songs.
- grasshopperpurp 5y agoYep, exactly. Around here we have a bunch of mockingbirds and blue jays, and you'll here the mockingbirds adopt some of the harsher sounds of the blue jays, but they usually surround them with melodic trills. It makes for a pretty dynamic contrast - reminds me of a Jazz solo.
- smackay 5y agoSpotless Starlings here in Lisbon are already mimicking the location beeps from rentable Scooters.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThat must make the scooter-finders' jobs difficult.
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- sharken 5y agoNo budgies it seems, although they're not usually seen in the wild which might be the theme here. To me it would be cool to be able to decode bird noises to their meaning. Am really curious as to what birds are chirping about.
- nicbou 5y agoI have used it, and it's VERY good. It also shows you the birds you can expect in your area and the recent sightings nearby. It's a great introduction to a layer of life I didn't pay attention to before.
- philote 5y agoAnd the interface makes it easy to isolate the bird noise you want to identify. It's such a great app.
- ragebol 5y agoThere's always a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- ggerganov 5y agoThis is very inspiring work - thanks for sharing!
- NicoJuicy 5y agoMmmm, could i reimplement this in a raspberry pi and continuously let it run offline in my parents garden? If so, any thoughts on how hard it would be? Since I don't use ml a lot and only experimented with recommendation engines with ml.net ( A lot of trees and a lot of birds at my parents place) Mostly because my dad would love this and it could be a fun project to get a better understanding of ML. Another interesting product is bird box, that keys you know which birds are feeding now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mybirdbuddy/bird-buddy-a-smart-bird-feeder https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mybirdbuddy/bird-buddy-...
- notdang 5y agoThere is a link to the source code: https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET I doubt that it will work on a Raspberry, but you can run it elsewhere and just send the audio to it.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoIf i'm not mistaking the linked dataset is more useful to run it offline: https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite Since it contains a tensorflow model and tensorflow can be used with ml.net. It would analyze recordings every 3 seconds. Since that is what the model expects. No?
- dotsam 5y agoBirdNet is great and has helped me to identify some birdsong. If you are also interested in identifying plants, PlantNet is good too. https://identify.plantnet.org/ https://identify.plantnet.org/
- stinos 5y agoTry talking to BirdNet, it'll tell you species = homo sapiens. Most plant recognition apps will stil try to match a plant when feeding it pictures of humans.
- Y_Y 5y ago"Breakthrough: AI Research Proves Once And For All That Humans Are Birds, Not Plants!"
- hatch_q 5y agoProbably a good reason for this. A lot of images of plants are in hands of humans (just checked PlantNET db) - i guess ML is modeled to ignore humans.
- stinos 5y agoThat could be one aspect, but I was actually talking about taking pictures of complete persons. Usually turns out you're a beetle, or a worm, or a butterfly :)
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- cmpb 5y agoAny comparison of PlantNet to iNaturalist[0] (regarding quality of the product / size of the community)? I use iNat frequently for identifying native plants and animals around the yard and it's been extremely helpful and active (I typically get at least one verification on each item I post, oftentimes two or three). [0] https://www.inaturalist.org/ https://www.inaturalist.org/
- aphrax 5y agoWe are lucky to have a number of birds types in our area - this app has been amazing for identifying who's who :) I especially like that when a match is made a simple link to Wikipedia is given. As a result I now know far more about bird migratory patterns than this time last year!
- larodi 5y agousing it for months now and it really makes one more aware of the songs of bird around. hope is properly funded and gains more popularity in the future. great app!
- tvirosi 5y agoThe idea that I've heard people for ten years suggest as 'this brilliant app idea I had', which is finally no longer a technical impossibility.
- zozbot234 5y agoRight on schedule: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- atonse 5y agoYep! I just left a comment about having this idea 10 years ago and my wife being annoyed that I didn't build it. But hard to explain "I would've literally received a PhD working on this" when my interest was mostly on the hobby side.
- ehsankia 5y agoAnd that's why there's a huge gap between ideas and execution.
- throwaway743 5y agoCan't wait to use this during Central Park walks with my SO!
- yrcyrc 5y agoPerfect, there are weird birds making a racket every night I needed to identify, timely!
- emodendroket 5y agoThis is great. I've become interested in birds over the past few years but it's an intimidating subject.
- SirFredman 5y agoI've been using this app for a few weeks now and it is awesome, it really makes you aware of the amount of plumage in the area. Highly recommended!
- silicon2401 5y agoThis is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN year after year. 99% may be a quick, mildly entertaining read, but that 1% tends to be empowering or life changing for me. I've had a continuously growing interest in plant and bird identification as a hobby (animals are a bit easier). I've gone so far as to research apps, put Audobon society books on my wishlist, and try to look up some specimens I see in my area. Unfortunately it's, frankly, a steep learning curve and not a habit yet for me to take pictures, remember to look at them later, search their characteristics, etc. This will be the perfect tool to help me jumpstart my newfound interest and get more familiar with the flora and fauna around my home.
- argc 5y agoYou should PictureThis for plant indentification. It works really quite well for me in the Pacific Northwest (though not perfect).
- derwiki 5y agoIve had good experiences with Seek for plant identification
- theshrike79 5y agoJust remember to watch out for impersonators when trying to find Seek from an app store. There are a bunch of really similar apps with $99/week billing that activates after trial automatically.
- jrgoff 5y agoiNaturalist is another good option for plant identification (and other forms of life as well). It has decent machine learning for suggesting IDs and is also backed by its community providing IDs. I've been using it a lot this year and have found it pretty helpful for IDs (though some regions and life forms are more likely to have good identifications than others), as well as for showing me what people are seeing in the area, and feeling like I'm contributing useful data.
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- dalbasal 5y agoFantastic. Those who do this the analogue way, often distinguish between bird song and "bird language." The former focuses on identifying species. The latter focuses on understanding the information birds convey to one another. Since a lot of it relates to predators (watch out, a fox!), this might be augmentable to determine the presence of silent animals too. fun.
- ganzuul 5y agoHow hard would it be for an AI to identify specific information conveyed by a call? Perhaps the various alerts that birds provide local fauna would be helpful to humans too?
- jobigoud 5y agoThere is a project called Earth Species that tries to decode animal communication using deep learning. https://www.earthspecies.org/ https://www.earthspecies.org/
- dalbasal 5y agoMy intuition is that it would be no different than human speech recognition. You'd need sufficient data, but the principle is the same. There arn't that many "words." Humans understanding bird calls isn't new. We've probably forgotten more than we know. That's not unique to us either. Different species often recognize each others' calls, particularly danger calls.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoI'd be interested in something like this to identify "dialects" in certain species of local birds. The bellbird/korimako[1] is well known for having distinct shared motifs within a given area. The dialectal song differences are readily noticeable, but mapping the dialect boundaries between populations would be really interesting. [1]: http://www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/bellbird http://www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/bellbird
- atonse 5y agoI had this idea nearly 10 years ago when my wife and I started dating and she introduced me to (very amateur) birding. I even talked about contacting Cornell for their database. But it was always going to be a hobby project. So when she read about this a few weeks ago, she literally smacked me for not building it. Now if I tell her it's on the front page of Hacker News AND everyone here loves the idea even more, I'm going to get another, harder smack because she knows how HN is full of others like me! (yes I'm aware that this community more than others will agree that ideas by themselves are a dime a dozen, but nonetheless, it would've been a really fun project)
- worldsayshi 5y agoTo be fair the idea is probably not that uncommon but it's hard to execute right. I think I had someone in my class (about 10 years ago) attempting this as a project.
- boredumb 5y agoNo time like the present.
- bcraven 5y agoThe Android app is about about 3 years old, so let her know there's 3 years of kicking to be done! https://www.appbrain.com/app/birdnet-bird-sound-identification/de.tu_chemnitz.mi.kahst.birdnet https://www.appbrain.com/app/birdnet-bird-sound-identificati...
- LanceH 5y ago
- flakiness 5y agoThe original version [1] is Theano based, but the newest one is TF-Lite based [2], probably for supporting mobile. Unfortunately they don't publish the code of TF version and only a TF-Lite model is available. Probably that doesn't matter for the exports though since the paper and original version are both there. More interesting thing is that they've been making the dataset available [3] for $20 (even before BirdNet). This can be great source for training your own bird-net like. - [1] https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET - [2] https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite - [3] https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/product/the-cornell-guide-to-bird-sounds-us-and-canada/ https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/product/the-cornell-guide-to...
- kkirsche 5y agoIs this a replacement or an augment for the Merlin ID project from Cornell? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/id773457673 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/...
- quokka 5y agoBirdNet has been around for several years now, while Merlin just got sound-id recently. Merlin has coverage for about 450 birds of North America, while BirdNet can id around 1000 birds of N Am. and Europe. With BirdNet you make a recording, highlight the interesting section of the sonogram, and upload that section to the BirdNet servers. With Merlin you start recording and the software ids birds in real time, popping up species as it goes. My assumption is that, because it runs locally on the device, Merlin is going to be less accurate than whatever BirdNet is able to do on its beefy servers. But it is has the advantage of working without a data connection. Merlin can also id from photos and descriptions. So the one isn't a replacement for the other. It's great to have options.
- drewwber 5y agoThe apps run two different models, and mobile phones are plenty powerful now to run some pretty complicated algorithms, so the offline accuracy of Merlin is pretty good. BirdNET and Merlin Sound ID are such different use cases (real-time classification of a rolling window of audio vs classification of a user selection) that we don't have any comparison metrics between the two, and they are really geared for different purposes (BirdNET’s goals align more with research in bioacoustics, while Merlin’s goals align more with outreach and education.) source: Merlin dev
- schleiss 5y agoI tested it with some Swiss birds [1]. It works extremely well. [1] https://www.vogelwarte.ch/de/voegel/voegel-der-schweiz/ https://www.vogelwarte.ch/de/voegel/voegel-der-schweiz/
- mschulze 5y agoA German variant is "Naturblick", https://naturblick.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/?lang=en https://naturblick.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/?lang=en It also allows sharing "sightings" (or "hearings") with a central service.
- dekhn 5y agoI used a similar program which said there was a red tail hawk. I looked up, and there was a red tail hawk.
- NegativeLatency 5y agoA lot of TV shows and movies use the red tailed hawk sounds for when a bald eagle is on screen. The eagle sounds are much cooler but it’s basically like the Wilhelm scream at this point.
- albert_crowley 5y agoLocal bird/wildlife tracking company near me is launching some consumer hardware that records/analyzes birdsong as well as links in to the radio tags that researchers put on birds they are tracking. If you are a bird person you might be interested: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/terra-listen-to-wildlife-while-conserving-nature#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/terra-listen-to-wildlife-...
- ronjouch 5y agoiOS app "Requires iOS 13 or later" :-/ . Too bad I can't use this on my still functional-and-receiving-security-upgrades iPhone 6. I suspect an overlap between the population enjoying birds and the population not buying a new phone every year, so I hope they can reconsider and broaden support. I contacted the authors at the email on the page, asking them to support iOS 12. Maybe email them too if you're also impacted.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI tried writing an program to do this ~10 years ago (I called it "Tweeter") using a system like Shazam. The problem is, Shazam can detect specific songs based on about a dozen different analysis points (found another use for poles and zeroes). But if the song is sped up or muffled, it differs too much from the source recording. Birdsongs are far more variable, even within the same species. Ironically, at the time I discovered Cornell was doing this same thing, but it looks like they finally got to a product by throwing an ML classifier at it. Very cool, ML is perfectly suited for this. The interesting thing I learned during my study was that there is an entire system of describing bird sounds with nonsense words ("skee-dlees chis chis chis") that goes back over a 100 years.
- hasmanean 5y agoIn the Anglo-Saxon world there’s always another system of describing things. The official system used Latin and Romantic language words (frequency modulation, intercourse, feces). It’s the jargon found in textbooks and research papers and taught in universities. The underground system uses Anglo Saxon words and is used by lab techs and people in the field (figuratively). Examples would be (tune, warbling, fuck, shit). One of these languages is considered respectable. The other is vulgar and suppressed to the point of cultural genocide. This is the way. It has been this way since feudal times.
- peanut_worm 5y agoThere is a similar app for photos called “Merlin”. Its not always a 100% accurate but it is usually at least close.
- Exmoor 5y agoMerlin also recently added sound ID for North America. I would assume they're working on other regions as well based on their previous track record.
- brimoore 5y agoWhat if the sound produced is made by different animals? What does it return?
- truth_ 5y agoI have known this project for a while, and I must warn you that this only works as expected on North American birds, and sometimes European birds. Outside of that, it simply fails. This is because the datasets are extremely highly skewed towards these geographic regions in terms of number.
- ganzuul 5y agoNow to figure out what they say, and where we should intervene in ecological matters. Perhaps we could gather more data with the help of Federated Learning and the like.
- ABraidotti 5y agoI have been using this app and it's awesome. The features are pretty simple but complete. Looking at the list of identified birds makes me think I'm just a two-legged ape living in a bird community, and I like that. I am also convinced cardinals and blue jays get along great with each other but are "not like other birds" types.
- johndill 5y agoGod I love this thing. Now I know all the birds in my yard by sight and sound and which SOB is the one that starts the racket 1/2 hour before sunrise (looking at you Catbird)
- shostack 5y agoI love it as well. It's become part of my morning coffee ritual where I listen to the birds and learn what's out there. What I've noticed is, rather than focus on endless scrolling through Reddit etc., I'm actually very present in listening to the calls, the nuances of them, and getting familiar with the pulse of the nature around me. This app simply gamifies that experience and let's me play audio pokemon while at the same time tuning out the rest of the world.
- lubesGordi 5y agoNot only does it help you identify birds by sound, but it shows a list of birds in your area so you can identify by sight!
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- jimmaswell 5y agoSome bird by me always sings the first note of the Ed Edd and Eddy theme, making me start playing it in my head. Maybe I can figure out what bird it is.
- tamlin 5y agoBirdNet is pure joy. Thanks to everyone who works on it. We've used the app relentlessly for a couple of years in the UK and when you show it to people they are amazed. People thank us for it and all we did was share it with them. Great work!
- twothamendment 5y agoThanks for the great app, been using it for years! Just this week I was in a place without cell coverage and wanting to use it. I'll have to try out Merlin.
- temp0826 5y agoShazam for birds? I don't know if it would hold up in a court of bird law
- bialpio 5y agoIs anyone else weirded out by the fact that the Android app is published from something that that looks like a personal account, as opposed to some kind of organization? Not sure how publishing for Android works - is it possible to hand off an app to a different account when you're no longer affiliated with the organization?
- distances 5y agoYes, you can transfer apps between accounts.
- qwertox 5y agoI love this app. The only thing I find a bit problematic is that if you have a match and fetch more info on the bird (Wikipedia / Macaulay Library / eBird), that none of these fragments have a "Share"-Button. I use that "Share"-button a lot (it usually looks like a "<") in order to save interesting stuff I later want to look at on my PC. There is enough free space on the top right for such a button (I think it's called the ActionBar?)
- q_eng_anon 5y agomost cornell thing I've ever seen
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- tyingq 5y agoI downloaded the app and tried to fool it with whistled bird songs. It correctly identified the species as "Human - Homo Sapiens - Likely".
- soheil 5y agoBut can it count the number of birds of the same specie? Do similar birds sound different to each other and can we detect that?
- fleddr 5y agoNote that for the opposite use case, knowing the bird yet wanting to hear its sound, there's this: https://www.xeno-canto.org/ https://www.xeno-canto.org/
- rahkiin 5y agoThis seems to work amazingly well even for our local birds.
- paul7986 5y agoI always wanted a Shazam for the outdoors ... identifies all the sounds your hearing while in a forest, by a lake, etc. Also, shows an overlay in your camera (AR) that guesses where/how far each creature is from you.
- jasonbourne1901 5y agoI wonder how well it will do with identifying the Mockingbird who plays his car alarm jingle outside my window at night Edit: Cool, mockingbird is on the list! This link off of their site has a sound sample for those that haven't experienced this bird https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Mockingbird/overview https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Mockingbird/ove...
- nanidin 5y agoFYI for anyone reading at Cornell - the donation page fails with "Fund Code This field requires a value." I wanted to make a contribution because a few months ago I was using the iSeek app[0] while hiking and I thought, "You know, with enough recordings of birds, it should be possible to build a classifier to identify birds based on their bird songs. Someone should make an app for that." And here it is! [0] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
- TimTheTinker 5y agoI guess the big question for birders would be: is BirdNet identification sufficient evidence for a log entry in a birding log book?
- Skeks1s 5y agoLike most ML, the true value of this is in the dataset. The model itself is a standard resnet architecture.
- krick 5y agoSo, is the actual data available? I am not seeing it.
- lliamander 5y agoApparently I can do a pretty decent impression of a Northern Mockingbird
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI just used this today, worked great even though there was ambient noise from traffic
- nazrulmum10 5y agoHow can computers learn to recognize birds from sounds?
- xpq 5y agoThe splash screen on IOS is so annoying long. The birds are silent once the app is ready to record.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoFinally. Wake up many times by different birds and really want to Id them … try it tomorrow see whether it works in Asia.
- IndySun 5y agoThese apps do not work. I've tried all of them. Every app listed here, and the OP BirdNet, are so ineffectual. They have no idea what they are listening to (unless location is on) and they cannot discern a genuine tweet from a washing machine squeak. The posters saying the apps are verging on incredible are completely deluded. I have used these apps, all of them, across Europe and North America, and they are inept and fail at a rate of 100%. Who are you people? And the top remark from the person that 'had this idea 10 years ago'... is this a joke? Where is YC going?
- nanidin 5y agoI whistled to the app and it identified the sound as human. I haven't gotten a chance to try it with an actual bird yet. Location (as well as date, time, light, air pressure...) is certainly a factor that should be used when classifying something though. I think the problem is probably related to data collection / data integrity. At least in my case, I'm using an iPhone that has variously placed microphones and speakers. It isn't clear to me how to hold the tool to collect the sound. If it gets wet or grungy, it's not something that is user-serviceable. I don't have an easy way to tell if it even needs to be serviced. If you're relying on the microphone that follows you literally everywhere to remain clean & untarnished - maybe that's the problem? My phone rides in my pocket, it picks up dust, it gets moist, it gets dropped, etc. Perhaps I'm projecting. Maybe your phone is untarnished and is working fine? Do you have data to back up the 100% fail rate across Europe and North America? It seems you might be projecting as well?
- IndySun 5y agoI work with audio, sometimes bird sounds (for interactive encyclopaedias), playing the driest, clearest, sound into the app is often right, but not always. You make a good point about the microphones. Sweeping through a sinewave can broadly tell you something about what the phone mic 'hears'. Most city birdsong ambiences are very complex soundscapes. There's some important characteristics in the higher frequencies of birdsong that will not be 'heard'. GPS helps to narrow down the the potential bird choices. So over time apps will learn and become more accurate. The open source Spleeter technology, unmixing stereo music, and its ilk, may be helpful run in real time allowing the app to ignore sound that is not birdsong.