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Comment by flexagoon | Hacker News Reader

> On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.

Do you know how it compares to iNaturalist? I'm not a birdwatcher, but I have iNat on my phone and sometimes use it to identify birds, and it seems to do a great job.

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I have tried both. Merlin is best for bird watching. It does not ask to upload any data. Just start the recording, it listens and let me know what is the bird is. Done. It only uploads, IF I want it upload.

A FOSS alternative is WhoBird, available on F-Droid and pretty good.

I tried that too, but it wasn't very good.

No comparison when it comes to sound. Try Merlin's abilities to identify bird sounds if you haven't yet.

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/the-magic-of-merlin/ for background, but I've always been floored by how well "make spectrogram plots and then use image recognition techniques on them" works, it feels like something you'd invent as a technobabble special effect in a scifi movie :-)

Right! Do you know how well the problem of multiple overlapping vovalizations has been solved? But anywway yes it's fantastic, and really cool that the models (Bird Packs to download on a phone) are becoming available for many more places around the world. I had been wanting to try it on South American birds for years and finally got the chance this year in southeastern Brazil and it was especially amazing in a place where I can place way fewer of the vocalizations.

iNaturalist/Seek only does photos doesnt it? Merlin can do sounds which is much much more useful for birds.

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