Last time I was sitting in the garden, I was wondering how far we are with actualy understanding the bird chirp and tweets. I felt like there were certain patterns I could hear repeatedly in certain situations (danger approach warning, feeding communication, always the same sound before one bird flew out and collected food kind of like "make us breakfast" :P). Unfortunately some quick searches on Google scholar didn't help much, I feel like I'm lacking the right search terms here. Most ML in this area seems to be related to species classification. If there's any bird experts reading, what is the state of the art of "understadning" bird language? Any paper recommendations? I'm curious about basic things like...is there a universal bird language or does each species use their own language (can a crow understand a sparrow), are there some sounds that are identified with meaning etc. Edit: just checked my bookmarks and "Bird-DB: A database for annotated bird song sequences" was the most interesting find, along with some interesting datasets (NIPS, Cornell Birdcall).

I was envisioning a ML powered device that could translate bird chirps to human readable text but my guess is that we're still in the fundamental research phase. One idea I had was recording stuff in my garden and running it through some unsupervised algorithms to identify some patterns than match it with video and maybe tag context. Would be really neat to find a pattern and see it correspond to the same situation (cat approaching). Seems like a neat summer project but I'm not even sure how to tag and label things :)

A first version that identifies the individual birds and their species would already be cool and I suppose feasible. Bird A (sparrow) speaking...bird B speaking etc. would already be fun...might give them random names, too instead of A,B,C. That would also help with the next stage for tagging etc.