Chirpomatic update

The first update is out for Chirpomatic, our Shazam®-style app for birdsong! The biggest change is that the recording time has been increased to 12 seconds - this will help to catch a few more chirps of each song, or the repeated phrase of a song, and will give the app more to analyse. We are approaching the time of the year when birds fall silent while they moult, so the extra recording time will be particularly useful.

We'd like to say a very big Thank You to everyone who has sent us a recording, whether by email or uploading. Your recordings will be used to improve the bird song recognition, and also give us an insight on the use of the app and where things might go wrong. They are incredibly helpful - please continue to send them!

Updates to Zwitschomat and Kvitteromat are still with Apple but should be released very soon.

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

Bird-safe mode

Summer is here, the birds are singing, and so are a multitude of bird apps on mobile devices. Playing bird calls on a mobile device or tablet may seem like a harmless bit of fun and even educational, but from the bird's point of view it is very different.

As soon as bird sounds start to play, nearby birds are distracted from feeding their young, and expend their energy looking for the phantom intruder. Most nature reserves discourage or even ban the use of mobile devices on their sites to protect the wellbeing and longevity of their birdlife. And it's also bad news for other birdwatchers who don't know if they are listening to a real bird or not.

But the problem is that it just isn't possible to use an automatic birdsong identifier without playing sounds loudly. You need to listen to your recording and listen to the matching sounds, to see if this is indeed the bird that you can hear.

That's why we came up with the idea of Bird-safe mode for Chirpomatic. When Bird-safe mode is switched on, you simply hold the phone to your ear as though making a phone call in order to hear the sounds. The best thing is that the sounds don't start playing until the device is next to your ear, so you don't miss anything. It is actually much easier to hear the sounds this way, so it is a win for the user and a win for the birds!

We are now going to add Bird-safe mode to our other apps as we update them, so that all our apps can be enjoyed with a clear conscience, without disturbing the birds or other birdwatchers!

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!