How can computers learn to recognize birds from sounds? The BirdNET research project uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to train computers to identify nearly 3,000 of the most common species of North America and Europe. You can record a file using the internal microphone of your iOS device and see if BirdNET correctly identifies the probable bird species present in your recording. Get to know the birds around you and help us to collect observations by submitting your recordings. BirdNET is a joint project of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Chemnitz University of Technology.
Super cool! But lacking some useful features
This app is awesome and tons of fun to use when out exploring nature. One feature I would really like to see is the ability to analyze/isolate certain frequencies on the spectrogram. This would be super helpful to remove background noise or target specific birds when multiple are singing at the same time.
Never works
Always pops up try again later
I came back to edit my review but App Store doesn’t allow you to edit
Again iPhones are terrible. Play Store for Android allows editing.
iPhone Bug
I know it’s because iPhones are stupid compared to Androids so it’s not the BirdNET app’s fault but on an iPhone you have to close out of the app and restart it in order to run a new recording. Is it possible to fix this bug and add the refresh button for the iPhone? Androids you can refresh (restart) a recording without having to completely shut down and restart the app but on dumb iPhones you have to close out of the app and restart it, it’s so annoying. Thanks!
Makes learning fun and easy
I know embarrassingly little about birds, and birdsong is hard to describe in words, so it’s impossible to look up after hearing one. This has been fun and easy to use, and has even helped me start to rectify my ignorance.
Poor
Used on a bird call I was familiar with and the app came up with multiple birds all incorrectly.
Frequently unable to identify birds
I have been using this app for a few years now. I found that it was better during its earlier versions. In its current state, the app frequently says that it’s unable to identity the bird in the audio clip. I sometimes wonder if the app creators are too strict in their regional restrictions of sources. Basically, when you use the app, it uses your location to identify what types of birds are usually found in your area. It then uses this list to compare audio captures to. The problem is, I think it cuts out a large chunk of migratory birds that may not be as common as the creators are restricting their sources to. Thus, you may only have luck identifying common birds, but at that point you probably already know what those birds are to begin with. I find the Merlin bird identification app to be better even though it only goes by physical descriptions and not audio captures. Both are connected to Cornell’s Ornithology lab, but the Merlin app lets you choose what sources you want to utilize, and this allows you to identify those rare birds in your area.
Minor feature improvement
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