I was taking a walk tonight and I was listening to the birds and wishing I had an app that could ID the birds by their call/song/chirp.  I got back home and did a little digging and I couldn’t find an app that did this.  So, either it is too hard or too expensive or both.  However, I think that it would be really cool.

So, it would work like this if I were to make it…  I would have the user’s location and I would know the date and the user would start recording.  The program would try and pick out possible spots in the recording where it thought there were bird sounds and ask the user which one if any were actually birds.  There would be a neat little slider for them to pick out the time frame where the bird actually chirped.  Then that sound bite would be classified using our database using machine learning algorithms.  They would then get back a description of the bird, picture of it, and other sounds it makes.  If it wasn’t able to id the bird then it would ask you if you happened to know it and you could add that bird to our database.  The more people that contributed the better the database would get and more accurate the results would be.  You could take a pic and link to maybe the wikipedia article or other article on it.

Then, as more and more people used the app we could have a game where it could sort of be like a scavenger hunt for birds.  Also, it would be cool to make a map of all the birds around the world that you could explore and would be built by the gps coordinates of the people using the app.