Ornivox: Identify Bird Songs

Every bird has a voice. Ornivox tells you whose it is — on your phone or your watch, even deep in the forest with no signal.

Stand still, listen, and find out who is singing. Ornivox identifies birds by their song — entirely on your device, with no internet connection needed. Take it deep into the forest, up the mountain or out on the marsh: it works where your phone has no signal.

HOW IT WORKS Tap the microphone and Ornivox listens in three-second windows. Each one is compared with more than 6,000 bird species using BirdNET, the bird-sound AI from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Your location and the time of year then narrow the results down to the birds that could really be around you right now — so a song in a Berlin park won't come back as an American robin.

A FIELD GUIDE IN YOUR POCKET Every species has its own page: a photo, its family, its conservation status, size facts and a short description. Browse the birds most likely near you this week, even before you hear one.

ON YOUR WRIST The Apple Watch app runs the whole identification on its own. Leave the phone in your bag and keep your hands free for binoculars.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN • Birds are identified on your device, with no internet connection. • Any moment in which it hears a human voice is discarded. Only the 3-second bird clips you keep in your journal are saved. • Your journal stays on your devices and syncs through your own private iCloud. The weather for an entry comes from Apple Weather, for a place rounded to about a kilometre. • No account, no ads, no tracking.

FREE Ornivox is free and non-commercial. Bird identification uses the BirdNET models by the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and Chemnitz University of Technology, with thanks to the BirdNET-Pi project. Species descriptions come from Wikipedia, facts from Wikidata and photos from Wikimedia Commons, each credited in the app.

Works on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, in English, German, Spanish and French.