Hacker News Reader

Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

This was correct a number of years ago. Feels a little strange we can just do an API call for bird recognition now.

But is there actually an API for that? Last I checked the big providers Video Intelligence APIs even distinguishing cats and dogs was still unreliable.

Just to see if a bird is in the picture (like the comic states) using chatgpt et al can probably do a sufficient job.

Not condoning people make this app, just thinking about how fast things have moved in just a few short years.

For a POC, I’ve done animal recognition in a picture with Anthropic and the various Amazon Nova models. It’s around 10 lines of code.

BirdNET from the Cornell lab of ornithology provides that api.

Unless I am missing something massive, BirdNET[0] is for identifying birds by sound, not by images.

Merlin[1] (also from Cornell Lab of Ornithology), on the other hand, has both image and sound ID. I haven't used either, so I cannot compare the quality of results from Merlin vs. BirdNET for sound ID, but afaik only Merlin has image ID.

0. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/

1. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

These days you dont need an api, you can run the stack on tamagochi

Flickr did it in 2014, same year as the comic. Unfortunately the service is down and they didn't include a screenshot of it working.

https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com