I use both Song Sleuth and Smart Bird ID (iOS). Fairly decent. I wouldn't bet any significant bet on it's accuracy 100% of the time. I'm no birder, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes.

🔗 AI Logo

🔗 and probably everything else too

🔗 Including the readme

The maintainer of the project probably won't see it here, but that repo does appear to be fairly active, they've got thousands of merged PRs. If you contribute a better logo they might replace the AI one.

It's an AI program specifically to use AI models to recognise birds. If you're against AI you should probably learn to recognise them manually.

Specialized models can be made incredibly efficient. The big tech guys are trying to replace humans which is why their crap takes such huge servers to run. Building local-first/only just means you need to specialize the model and the pipeline to match what you're doing

It's a small model that runs on your machine using a TFLite model. AI/ML models come in many different sizes. Some more conducive for running locally than others. There's more info on the detection pipeline here.

I didn't write this, just found and self hosted it.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it's a question of focused, tight training. What they're doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

It's a big, big grift.

It can run on device on your phone https://birdnet.cornell.edu/

I haven't verified it, but it local ML models on audio is pretty efficient and should run fine on a raspberry pi.

It is the same back end, but this one runs continuously on a server instwad of on your phone.

I'm afraid Merlin's addition of videos of automatically running when birds are detected is the beginning of enshitification. Phone charge no longer lasts a full field day with this additional drain on battery. Bird of the day, x number of people listening, I don't need of want any of this shit. Also dislike can no longer immediately cancel recording without saving, have to wait while application buffers or something before can exit without saving, for a long recording this can take more than 15 seconds. Pity, app is generally very helpful.

Yeah, Merlin has been my go-to forever.

Nice. What kind of microphone setup do you have? I'm just starting with security cameras because I have those, but the audio quality is ehh.

Stated Jake Farm