Hey everyone,
Seek by iNaturalist has, until now, used an old on-device computer vision model from several years ago. It has about 20k taxa in it and really doesn’t work well for many parts of the world outside of North America and Europe.
We’ve added CV model 2.13 to the latest beta release of Seek (the same version currently used in iNaturalist Next), which has about 80k species in it and allows it to recognize more species both in the regions where it was already working well in addition to other parts of the world.
However, having a much larger model means we’ve had to tweak the in-camera suggestions so that the app provides suggestions at a satisfying rate while also being accurate - it has many more taxa to try and go through, which complicates the process. (That’s about the extent of my understanding at a technical level)
We think we have it in a pretty good place now but need some feedback from the community, so if anyone has an iOS device and wants to test out this beta version, it would really help us understand if Seek’s working well and is satisfying to use for you all.
If you’re interested, you’ll have to download Apple’s Testflight app to your device, then open up this link on your device: https://testflight.apple.com/join/LM5oO3P7 Install the beta version, scan some organisms and let us know here or at help+seek@inaturalist.org what you think. Is it accurate? Does the camera work OK? Are you getting suggestions at a satisfying rate as you scan organisms?
Please keep in mind that beta versions may not work, may have bugs, or may cause issues with your current Seek observations. If you have a lot of precious Seek observations on your device, there’s a very slight possibility they get deleted. Unlikely but possible.
Thank you!