Chirpomatic: automatic birdsong identification!

We are delighted to announce our latest app, Chirpomatic, an automatic birdsong identifier!

Chirpomatic works rather like Shazam® does for music. When you hear a bird, quickly hold up your phone and start recording. After 10 seconds, the app will start analysing the sound, and will show you the top matches along with photos of the birds and notes to tell you  how varied the sound can be. You can compare your recording with the reference samples to check the identification.

The first version of the app covers bird calls and songs of parks and gardens in north-west Europe, and is currently available in English, German (Zwitschomat) and Swedish (Kvitteromat). We are already working on versions for North America, starting with backyard birds of the west coast USA, particularly California. If you would like to be told when the US versions are ready, you can sign up here.

The app works entirely off-line so you can use it wherever you are without worrying about network connections. The recordings you make are stored in the app so you can listen again, you can email them, or upload them to us. The recordings that you send us will be used to improve the app, and will also be made available to researchers.

As with all the iSpiny apps, Chirpomatic has been developed by myself and Alex Wilson. Alex is a specialist in machine learning and is currently completing his PhD at Oxford University. We also had advice from Dr Phil Howard, data scientist at a major games company.

We've been working on Chirpomatic since the end of 2013, but the road to a Shazam-style app for bird sounds is littered with highly publicised projects that failed to be completed, so we didn't announce it until we were absolutely sure that we would be able to finish it! And now we can celebrate!

If you would like to find out more about Chirpomatic, tap here for the App Store.

Shazam® is the registered trademark of Shazam Entertainment Limited and is not affiliated with iSpiny in any way.

Chirp! on the iPhone 5

After a gentle reminder on the Chirp! Facebook page page, we've been finishing off the full screen iPhone 5 version of Chirp! The app looks good on the iPhone 5 - the larger screen allows the bird photo on the Browse screen to be larger, and also the text of the song description. The downside is that the app will no longer run on devices using iOS 3 or 4, thus eliminating the old iPhone 3. It's a great shame, but sadly we didn't have much choice.

It's December already!

I knew it was a long time since my last post, but I am astonished that nearly a year has gone past! It has been a very busy year, and although there no new apps to show for it, our existing apps are now nearly complete (!). The British bird guides are now fully iPad compatible, and with a lovely new design that has been made specially for the iPad. We find it depressing that so many reference apps simply enlarge the graphics of their iPhone app to make it fit on the iPad screen, and we asked Marcello to create a design that was specifically for the iPad but with a layout that was sufficiently similar to the iPhone design that it would be easy to move from one to the other. We are delighted with Marcello's design, and thanks too to Rhodri Griffith of Cwcw Creative who stepped into the breach to produce the elements of the design. I know I'm bound to be biased, but I think ours are without doubt the nicest looking iPad bird apps!

New logo for iSpiny

New year, new logo! We are searching for a new logo for iSpiny by holding a contest on 99Designs. We are down to the final four - will you help us choose by taking part in our poll?

Logo poll - click here!

Vogelgids van Nederland

Our Dutch app is out! Released into the wild of the AppStore, we hope that it will flourish and prosper. It's called Vogelgids van Nederland and it's a guide to birds of the Netherlands (in Dutch and English). The text has been translated by specialist translator, Max Nuijens, and the interface by Chirp! translator, Frans Schutgens, so it should be good! Any mistakes are entirely my fault as it was my job to transfer their text into the app. Now we wait and watch with baited breath to see how out well our young app will fly :).

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas (or other celebration of your choosing), and very best wishes for 2012!

Expanding into new countries!

I'm taking advantage of a very brief lull to bring the latest update. The most exciting news is that work on our forthcoming guide to birds of the Netherlands, Vogelgids van Nederland, is almost complete! It should be ready for final testing in the next day or so and we hope to have it in the AppStore before Christmas.

We've also been working on an update to Chirp! Europe and expanding it to include Spain and Portugal. No new birds for those countries yet, but we have some lined up for a spring update and I hope we will be able to expand into Italy as well. Just in time for spring and summer holidays in southern Europe!

Goodbye Steve Jobs

I can't say it better than others have - Steve was a visionary and creative genius who made things happen. It's a sad day.