Birdnet-go is a real-time sound analyzer that detects bird species. It can take in audio from microphones. I set mine up to stream audio from my security cameras that I already had installed. There’s even a Home Assistant App, if you’re using it.
I live in a more suburban/semi-urban environment, but was really surprised to so many different bird species.
A quick general awareness comment:
A post about a project not by the original creator is not a promo post. A user will not necessarily know the details to provide a disclosure unless a project explicitly has on in their repo.
Requiring it on a project post like this (“Here’s a cool thing I found!”) is not doable.
That said, its clearly an AI project start to finish - the detection wouldn’t really work without it. So I think [AIT] is appropriate here.
@[email protected] can you please add the [AIT] tag?
Edit: Thanks!
If you need something on the go I quite enjoy whoBIRD (available from F-Droid). Wonder if these use the same model.
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.
There is also this similar software, which is a little clunky but not slop https://github.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi
For the benefit of others:
Review the license!!
You may not use BirdNET-Pi to develop a commercial product!!!
BirdNET-Pi
A realtime acoustic bird classification system for the Raspberry Pi 5, 4B, 400, 3B+, and 0W2
Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com
About this fork:
I’ve been building on mcguirepr89’s most excellent work to further update and improve BirdNET-Pi. Maybe someone will find it useful.
[…]
Introduction
BirdNET-Pi is built on the BirdNET framework by @kahst
using pre-built TFLite binaries by @PINTO0309 . It is able to recognize bird sounds from a USB microphone or sound card in realtime and share its data with the rest of the world.
Check out birds from around the world
Features
- 24/7 recording and automatic identification of bird songs, chirps, and peeps using BirdNET machine learning
- Automatic extraction and cataloguing of bird clips from full-length recordings
- Tools to visualize your recorded bird data and analyze trends
- Live audio stream and spectrogram
- Automatic disk space management that periodically purges old audio files
- BirdWeather integration – you can request a BirdWeather ID from BirdNET-Pi’s “Tools” > “Settings” page
- Web interface access to all data and logs provided by Caddy
- GoTTY and GoTTY x86 Web Terminal
- Tiny File Manager
- FTP server included
- SQLite3 Database
- Adminer database maintenance
- phpSysInfo
- Apprise Notifications supporting 90+ notification platforms
- Localization supported
Removed by mod
Ditch the AI slop logo, please.
🔗 AI Logo
🔗 and probably everything else too
🔗 Including the readme
and probably everything else too
*Takes a look at the first three folders*
.agents/skills.claude/skills.cursor/rules
Yep…
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.
Oh you’ll smoke a turd in hell for your insolence. That would make sense. It’s much easier to complain.
“AI” is a pretty bad blanket term. BirdNet / Merlin is a model trained specifically on bird calls (and some noises) built to recognize bird calls. App and logo use huge general-purpose models to create content of questionable quality.
And yes, a decent birder should never trust just Merlin ID.
Xale, the logo is pretty, on topic and quite cute. Is it made with AI? No idea. Does it really matter?
Give open source projects a break will you?
If you don’t like the logo just say so.
If you don’t like the logo just say so.
That’s literally what I did.
I guess if you spend enough time chatting with sparkling autocomplete you forget how real conversations work.
They did express their displeasure. Even said please
That’s true…
It is AI. 2min doodle would be better than this
I still like it and i have seen projects with much uglier logos made by humans. Nothing against humans or AI either.
An ugly logo made by a human wasn’t made by stealing from artists and disproportionately contributing to a climate crisis.
eta a qualifier I had assumed would be unnecessary…
and contributing to a climate crisis.
Unless you want to argue that simply being alive is contributing to the climate crisis, I sure hope you don’t eat meat.
Would you prefer I brought up:
- The excessive use of fresh water?
- The further upwards accumulation of wealth?
- The effects on the cost of energy in communities near data centers?
- The increased air pollution in communities near data centers powered by on-site gernators?
You can’t just argue against one issue and brush aside the others. From my point of view, use of generative AI borders on indefensible.
You seriously don’t see the difference between a person existing and data centres pumping out slop made with stolen training days for the profit of billionaires? I’ll take a meat eating truck driver over an LLM defending vegan jogger any day.
I’m not defending LLMs, and neither are vegans. I’m pointing out that hating on datacenters for climate reasons if you then also eat meat is insane and detached from reality.
Or drive a car
How does this compare to merlin? I dont currently have any reason to distrust the cornell university department of ornithology… but if they ever turn evil its good to know there’s a backup
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.
OMG, birdnet-go is amazing. I had setup birdnet-pi, till an update to either docker or birdnet-pi broke it.
Now using birdnet-go and the stats are insane, this is just the last week
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.
Like you, using my security cameras. Riolink seems to have the loudest audio of the 2 I use. The other is a Unifi UVC G3 I had from work
My mom loves this so I build some additional microphones using https://github.com/Sukecz/ESP32-birdnet-mic and by 3d printing some casing for it to keep bugs out.
Let this post be the one to ask a question that’s been bothering me (not a coder):
Multi-model local AI inference, runs 24/7 on a Raspberry Pi.
This and similar claims in other software suggest - to me - that the AI is running locally on the raspi, no need to exchange data with sites providing AI APIs or whatever.
I struggle to believe that this is possible, let alone on a raspi.
So, how “local” ar the AIs that help more and more software with various tasks?
Is “local AI” some sort of selling point that is often false or deliberately misleading? “Localwashing”?
Audio processing by ai can absolutely happen on a pi.
As an example, whisper.cpp is a high performance speech recognition model, and it does a great job. The biggest version of it as a model requires less than 5GB to live fully in memory, the large model at about 1.5billion parameters, and it works great even CPU only.
The one used most often is small, which has about 244million parameters, and needs about a gig of ram and nothing more.
For a pi 5, usually the base or tiny model are used. Small could be used in most scenarios, but tiny and base are able to run real-time.
So it depends for how local - sometimes its all self contained and can do just fine on a pi, sometimes its local in that it needs an LLM endpoint to hit, but that can be running on another system entirely.
It would really depend on the project for how/where/why for a definition of local.
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
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.
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
Didn’t downvote you however, are you saying if I ran an AI model local, that scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown is ok with you, just because it’s local?. Because that’s exactly what we’re are doing when we access the internet. Throw AI out of the scope, and we’re still pumping massive amounts of carbon in to the air, still turning the water brown. There are 8.4 billion people on this planet. Approximately 6.3 billion of them are online. That’s just individual humans. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of data centers that aren’t even connected with AI and all the energy production to make them run.
So, who will be the first to actually practice what you preach and shut down your servers and internet devices? C’mon…make the first step towards a cleaner planet.
This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.
That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.
This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels
But it doesn’t.
… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.
But it is.
So, now what are we going to do? Give me real world solutions that will actually fix the issue, which would be implemented by real world corporations and real world data centers. I’m not problem hampered, I’m solution based. So let’s fix it.
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.
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.
If you’re speaking of audio analysis ML or AI models, they are quite efficient. As a mediocre musician, who is clinically deaf and cannot hear some frequencies with enough clarity to make a judgement either way, I lean on AI assisted audio mastering. I haven’t dabbled in AI generated music, but with the right DAW and a handful of plugins, some keyboards and instruments, you can do a lot right in the comfort of your home.
Rule 7+8
Someone share this with the bird voyeurs.
Stated Jake Farm
