BirdNET

BirdNET-Team

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 has been a game changer for me, a novice birder who often goes out by myself. Many thanks for developing this for Android! Update (2026) - After having this on my phone for 5 years, I now use Merlin more because of its real-time ID capability, even when offline. However, BirdNet can sometimes ID a bird that Merlin doesn't recognize. Also in BirdNet, you highlight a defined part of the recording with just the calls you want, often eliminating the need to use other editing software.

This is a really complicated app for me. I downloaded it a few days before I actually used it only to find out that it had been running the whole time. When I did use it to record I couldn't easily figure out how to seperate what sounds I wanted identified and couldn't find a way to clear everything to start from new.

More useful than Merlin in places where location info is spotty because "show wild guesses" often contains the correct species, which Merlin will not show. It is surprising and disappointing however that birdnet and merlin do not play nicely together. There seems to be no way to take a recording from merlin and analyze it in the birdnet app.

What’s new

BirdNET: The easiest way to identify birds by sound.