‘The idea to create a bird app came to me as an exchange student in Portugal,’ says Tanel Peet, ‘both out of curiosity and desire to do something for nature. As you learn about nature, it becomes more important to you. And if something is important, you wants to preserve it,’ he continues. The bird app served as Tanel’s master’s thesis at the Tallinn University of Technology.

It allows the user to identify birds, record birdsong, identify birds heard on the recording, and read additional information about birds.

By joining our project, Siuts will be able to further develop the birdsong app – by adding birds as well as improving the app's ability to recognise birds by their calls! Siuts is currently able to detect 169 bird species, which will be increased to 200 next year, and the design of the app will become more user-friendly. Next year, the app will include distribution maps of bird species, their conservation status and, in a few years' time, it will also be available in English and Russian.

The users of the app know that if there are a lot of birds singing at once on a spring morning in the woods, for example, the app sometimes has trouble identifying them. ‘A lot depends on your phone's recording ability, the background sounds, and the birds' own song,’ says Kaja. ‘Siuts cannot recognise all the mating calls yet, it is learning along with the users’.

So far, the developers of Siuts have consulted with the Ornithological Society to develop the app, and have sourced bird images and sounds from ornithologists and hobby ornithologists; however, the more bird sounds are added to the app, the more the model learns!

The app is available in both the App Store and Google Play.