BirdNET

Stefan Kahl

About this app

How can computers learn to recognize birds from sounds? The BirdNET research project uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to train computers to identify more than 3,000 of the most common species worldwide. You can record a file using the microphone of your Android 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.

Ratings and reviews

This app is so cool! It's easy to use (intuitive) and very accurate (even identified my "tweet-tweet" as "human, almost certain" - cracked me up!). It allows the user to select the specific range of any recording, to isolate the call of interest and I love that it gives a degree of certainty to each result. Really enjoying it!

Excellent technology, incredibly useful in most conditions. The reporting of results is fast and user-friendly. Three flaws: (1) the Play button doesn't work (at least in Android), so selecting the right section of the recording to analyze is guesswork; (2) there seems to be no way to check the version number; and (3) there is no way to disable automatic identification of your location by GPS, or to select it manually, so as to detect birds that are not normally in your area.

This app has been surprisingly accurate so far. I would make two suggestions for this product going forward. First, there needs to be a playback feature so the user can be sure he/she recorded what they were trying to. Second,I think it would be helpful to label and save sound bites for later analysis. Often, in the field, there is no signal available to send recordings for results. I will continue to use this app when practical and look forward to future editions as testing progresses.

What's new

BirdNET: The easiest way to identify birds by sound.