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BirdGenie

BirdGenie™ is a breakthrough app that helps anyone accurately identify birds in the backyard, local park, or on the nature trail—all with the tap of a button! Just hold up your phone or tablet, record the bird singing, and BirdGenie™ helps you identify the species. The app’s highly developed sound identification ability and expert matching system enable bird enthusiasts to achieve an accuracy unheard of in the birding field. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to learn more about the birds around them.
Category Price Seller Device
Education $3.99 Princeton University Press Apps iPhone, iPad, iPod

BirdGenie™ includes up to two hundred vocalization types for one hundred species: literally all of the birds likely to be encountered in a backyard or local park, or on a hike, in North America at any time of the year. And the app is easy to use. Just point at a bird, and tap the screen when the bird starts singing. The app’s automatic pre-record feature ensures that you won’t miss the beginning of the song and BirdGenie’s™ patented, highly accurate expert system matches the recording to the closest species. The app’s sophisticated noise-reduction feature means that even in noisy environments, where there is conversation or traffic, you can discover what bird you’re listening to.

Beyond specifying a bird species, BirdGenie™ provides sample songs and spectrograms to compare with your own recording and to guarantee a confident match. The app also includes pictures of all plumages, information about habitat and behavior, and links to further reading. It even has 3-D models for some of the species so you can match different views of a bird. You can share your recordings, photos, and matches with friends and other users, and if you’re so inclined, you can anonymously share recordings to a scientific database to help researchers learn about birdsong variations. No internet connection is required for anything but sharing, making the program accessible everywhere.

Perfect for anyone who wants to know what birds are singing around them, BirdGenie™ takes bird identification to a whole new awesome level.

With BirdGenie™ you can:

Quickly identify most birds just by recording their songs
Look at vivid images of the bird—some in 3-D!
Listen to samples of the bird’s various songs and compare them with your recording
Keep a log of all your recordings
Share your recordings, matches, and photos with friends and family
Browse the built-in catalog to learn about local species, their other songs, their habits and diet, and much more
Use the app anywhere, as no internet connection is required!

Important features of BirdGenie™:

The matching expert system beats anything in the market today
Easy-to-use guided user interface
Effective noise-reduction system helps users make identifications in less-than-ideal environments
Complete species accounts with multiple photos for all plumage types (some with 3-D models)
Comprehensive spectrograms (voiceprints of songs)

Tom Stephenson’s articles and photos have appeared in Birding and Bird Watcher’s Digest, at Surfbirds.com, and in the Handbook of the Birds of the World. He has guided groups across the United States and Asia. Stephen Travis Pope is an award-winning composer, performer, and software engineer who develops new digital-audio processing applications. He has worked on audio analysis programs and music search engines for over a decade. Scott Whittle lives in Cape May, NJ, and has 20 years of experience as a professional photographer and educator. His images have been published in a wide range of magazines, newspapers, and books. He is a one-time New York State Big Year record holder. He and Tom Stephenson are members of the team that holds the U.S. Big Photo Day record. He is also the coauthor, with Tom Stephenson, of The Warbler Guide (Princeton).

Technical Specifications:

Requires iOS 10 or later. Compatible with all iPhones after iPhone 6 and iPad, iPad Mini, and iPod Touch.

BirdGenie™ is a trademark of Princeton University Press.

Reviews

BirdGenie
Marcia164

Great app, easy to use and a lot of fun for someone like myself who enjoys backyard birding. Not only does it identify the birds I’m hearing, it has interesting information and additional images to help me learn more. I can tell that this app will get a lot of use by me and the family!


Revolutionary
outsideordie

So cool! It immediately identified several birds in my yard on the first try. The instructions were helpful and it was easy to adjust and crop the recording. I’ve tried a few other apps like this one, but they didn’t work at all. I’m excited to finally have one that does.


Figured out a mystery bird
annierose50

Used the app to record a mystery song I've heard many times and found it was a cardinal a bird I've seen at the feeder many times. Great to solve that mystery


No matches
Rango007

Like the simple interface. Real easy to use. However, I have tried very common birds house finch and common loon. Pre recorded calls. Ambience free, crystal clear recording. App is way off. It didn’t recognize them. Not even an inch close. Excitement before downloading Disappoint after using it once. Hope it gets better with time. Thank you.


Terrible
AndiG1229

If I could give it zero stars I would. It doesn’t even recognize basic backyard bird calls and songs.


Barely works
entrelac

I love the idea of this app, and it is intuitive to use. But during real world usage, for me it's only managed to match correctly once. As far as I can tell, this happens when they don't have a specific bird sound in their library, and not because the match function doesn't work or because my recording wasn't clear enough. Users can browse the library of birds and sounds that come with the app. It's missing a lot. Like it has one common sound the Eastern Towhee makes, but not the other common sound it makes. It didn't have a common Northern Cardinal call or Carolina Wren call. So of course it won't be able to match those sounds correctly. Until more birds and calls/songs are added, it just isn't going to work most of the time simply because it doesn't have the sounds to match. I hope development is continuing on this app because it does seem like the basic functionality is there.


Doesn’t work very well
MvBNl

I tries many times but never had a match. Disappointed.


Disappointed
birder is unhappy

After about 30 attempts, I’ve two things to note. The first is that I’ve not gotten even one match. The second is that the app frequently (every third use, like clockwork) freezes so that I have to reboot the phone. I’ve reached out to the developer but have not gotten any response.


Truly terrible
OrnithoRiparia

It has yet to successfully match a species to a recorded call. It also freezes and crashes at the cropping screen more than half the time.


Over 10 recordings an only one match
mfd14534

I realize this app is attempting a difficult task. But 90% of the time it doesn’t find a match. So why bother?


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