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.
Ditch the AI slop logo, please.

Totally agree, I threw a quick filter on some public domain, actual human artwork, and cropped it square. Took me as long as it would have taken to generate that slop logo.
Here’s the original source: Citation
For the love of anything even mildly good or wholesome…enough of the fucking AI slop images!
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Yup… HUGE difference between human curated machine learning and generative AI. AI sure is a buzzword these days, which is why it gets used in marketing, but I think doing so is confusing people who don’t know enough to distinguish between the different flavors of “AI”.
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
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
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”?
edit: thanks for all the answers, this has been enlightening.








