Bird watchers have released an app that recognizes birds by their chirping

On modern devices, there have long been various applications that are able to “listen” to fragments of songs being played anywhere, and inform the user about who exactly is singing the work, what it is called, and so on. Something similar, only for a narrower audience, was released by ornithologists of the Cornell Laboratory – they released an application called Merlin Bird ID, which can identify the type of bird by how it “sings”. And, theoretically, anyone can use the works of scientists, since the application is absolutely free – you can safely join the world of bird researchers around the world.

Merlin Bird ID app interface

Bird watchers said the Merlin Bird ID “listens” to the bird chirping and then uses artificial intelligence technology to identify the species. Previously, it was almost impossible to do this – AI did a poor job with various sounds, but scientists managed to make a breakthrough in this direction when chirping sounds began to be viewed as images, applying various algorithms already to this data. Now the application records sound, forming a spectrogram, and already its artificial intelligence analyzes, taking into account the amplitude of the waves, their frequency and duration.

Moreover, in the process of sound processing, the application screen will display photos of birds in real time, which are currently “singing” within the range of the user’s smartphone microphone. Unfortunately, now the software is able to recognize the sounds of only 400 species of birds, preferably those species that nest in the United States and Canada – against the background of almost 11 thousand species known to ornithology, this is a drop in the ocean. However, the developers are gradually solving this problem – they have already officially announced that they plan to release updates for the Merlin Bird ID in order to add support for determining the singing of additional bird species.

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