I was not aware until today (thank you @argent1277) that there is a new version of the BirdNET app called ‘BirdNET Live’, available on iPhone and Android. It was developed by Stefan Kahl as a collaboration between Chemnitz University of Technology and Cornell University. It draws on several databases including iNaturalist. Like Merlin and the original BirdNET app, it identifies animals based on live sound snippets. It has a number of very nice features:
Covers all animal groups including birds, frogs and insects (currently about 5000 species covered worldwide)
Shows species in real time as they are detected (like Merlin, unlike the legacy BirdNET app)
Shows percentage confidence in each identification (unlike Merlin)
Performs 100% offline, with all ID performed on-device
Very fine-grained user settings. For example, you can allow your location to be set by GPS or manually, or opt to use the worldwide database. There are several settings to balance the probabilities of false positives (misclassification) and false negatives (non-detection).
Can also ID from saved files.
I have not yet tested the app extensively, but it seems to work very well. Interested in anyone else’s reports.
@spint Thanks for the update. I stopped using BirdNET in favour of Merlin long time ago so I didn’t notice there was a new version. Looking forward to testing it. The feature list looks impressive. And I’m super excited it can ID other animal sounds too.
Do you happen to know how it uses iNaturalist? So far it feels like audio on iNat isn’t being used to its full potential (compared with e.g. eBird/Macaulay Library who have recently been encouraging uploads of non-bird media, for potential training I assume) but if iNat audio recordings are already helping with training BirdNET then that might motivate me to upload more recordings than I have been, and put more effort into identifying them.
the challenge I’ve had with the old BirdNET app is that it simply didn’t allow me to go forward or backward in the audio. Maybe user error, but I guess I’ll see if this new version helps. I use Merlin and then save audio, but I have a massive backlog of audio bc it needs editing and also I can only upload it to iNat via the website, not via my phone.
It’s not clear to me how intensively audio recordings from iNat are being used. Reading between the lines, they use iNat for the taxonomic backbone, but the main sources for audio are the Macauley Library and Xeno-canto:
It’s very possible this is a dynamic situation. I also wonder if they would be open to input from experienced iNat IDers in annotating the audio. It might be a good source of expertise and willingness to volunteer.
Ha, what a fun coincidence that you just posted this! Yesterday, I was thinking that I should ask here on the iNat forum whether there’s an app like Merlin, but for amphibians and insects. So thanks for the info — perfect timing!
This was never a problem to me, in BirdNet, at least in when you selected the bit for analysis, you could go wherever you wanted in that bit. I had a problem with Merlin that I only could save the whole record. So not much use for recording for iNat.
Also in birdNet Live I cannot find how to mark an arbitrary recorded interval for saving. Similar limitation as Merlin. But then it is hard to use for making recordings for iNaturalist. I can at least Apply trim for a single interval. But others in that record will be lost.
You seem to be able to trim, export and then undo the trim to return to the original recording and retrim, maybe that’s a good enough workaround? I hadn’t realised you can trim in-app, that’s also a nice feature that Merlin lacks
Update on this: I asked the developer directly and they replied:
Absolutely, yes! We do use iNat audio for training, so if you submit to iNat you’ll help us improve our models. We have pretty decent coverage for birds, but non-bird taxa are challenging - especially insects.
So I would say every bit of audio on iNat counts, especially of underrepresented taxa.
I had previously set up this project to assist with learning singing insects in my province. If there’s anything that would help the developer with making recordings more useful (e.g. observation fields, notes, copyright level, etc.) that would be great to know. Maybe also if there are any thresholds they’re trying to reach like a minimum number of recordings for each species? Then I can also alert the top observers and identifiers in the project in case that motivates anyone. If it’s possible for targetted action in a particular region to improve the app ID in that region then it would be great to work on that collectively!
I was excited to find an audio app that includes taxa other than birds! But the help page says “The BirdNET+ V3.0 model identifies 5,250 bird species worldwide”. So only birds, as the name implies. Where did you get info about other taxa being included?
Ok, I will ask them what they need. They did say that audio annotated with bounding boxes is the most useful and that Xeno-canto has now introduced this feature. As far as I know, it’s not possible to do this with iNaturalist (?)
@conorflynn You are in North America, I think? Just take the app outside and try it out, I presume that it can ID common insects and frogs where you live. I am in Europe, so can’t verify, but it does pretty well with the common orthopterans here. You can see the list of species it currently covers here (you can restrict to broad taxa in the drop-down menus):
Thanks for the tips for BirdNET Live! It looks quite handy and has the potential to replace my clunky setup of multiple apps: a recording app to trim the clips, notes in a note taking app, and Merlin for ID.
Tips for all: to add BirdNet Live clips to iNaturalist (at least on android) easily, one can:
in settings > export, check only the audio (so that the export is the audio file rather than a zip)
in settings > recording, use WAV instead of FLAC (iNat supports WAV but not FLAC)
After doing so, when one clicks share, the app would share the wav audio files (directly to iNaturalist as a new observation, or anywhere else that accepts an audio file)
I strongly prefer the original BirdNet app over Merlin. It’s very easy to select a snippet of a recording and share it to iNat, which I love. When I use Merlin I just leave it running so I can see what it hears as I’m out iNatting, but I’ll use BirdNET once I hear something specific that I want to create an observation for (even for non-bird sounds). It’s just so much easier to clip a specific bit of audio. In my experience, it also seems like BirdNet is better at recognizing quieter/farther sounds. There are times when I can hear a distant bird pretty clearly, then recording with Birdnet and get a good ID from the app, while Merlin doesn’t even display the little dot that indicates its hearing something.
Anyway, I’m downloading BirdNET Live now and I’m excited to try it out. I hope clipping and submitting audio is similarly easy as it is with the original BirdNET app.
Yes, that’s helpful, and he even recently added a feature for making bounding boxes. However any external tool will be used by far fewer people than something fully integrated into iNat by default, resulting in less potential data for downstream users like BirdNET. I’m also not sure what the best way would be to save the bounding box/timestamp information from that extension so that the BirdNET people can use it.