Some tech projects generate a lot of information, and that information isn't always used as well as it could be.I have a Raspberry Pi project running bird detection software, and it's identified a large number of species.I decided to see if I could take the audio that it had captured and turn it into an educational game.
My Raspberry Pi is listening to birdsong BirdNET can identify species of birds from their songs Close I live in the countryside, and we have a lot of birds that visit our garden, and even some nesting in the eaves of our house.I'd used phone apps before to identify some of these birds by their calls, but these apps only capture audio when you're using them.I decided to use a Raspberry Pi to set up a bird detector that could run non-stop.
A USB microphone with a long lead is connected to my Raspberry Pi, with the microphone sticking out of a window with a small cover to protect it from rain.The audio from the Raspberry Pi is passed to my mini PC, which is running the BirdNET-Go software.BirdNET is a free, open-source tool that can identify bird species based on their sounds.
The audio clips are converted into spectrograms, which BirdNET analyzes using a deep-learning model trained to identify bird sounds.BirdNET can then list the most likely species match for the bird call, along with a measure of the confidence of the detection.BirdNET has detected more than 70 different species of birds Some detections are more likely than others Since I've been running BirdNET-Go, it's detected more than 70 species of birds from the audio picked up by the microphone.
Some detections are far more frequent than others, with common local birds detected thousands of times.Some birds only have a handful of detections, and while some of these have reasonably high confidence scores, I won't be completely convinced that they really have been heard in the vicinity of my house until the number of detections increases.The problem is that I don't recognize many of these birds' calls, other than the most obvious ones.
In an ideal world, I'd be able to step outside, take a listen, and confirm with my own ears that yes, that really was the sound of a Eurasian Eagle-Owl.Related I Tried 6 Snore-Tracking Apps for Android—Here Are My Findings Find out whether you snore, how loudly it gets, and what you can do about it with these Android snoring tracker apps.Posts By Joy Okumoko I wanted a way for my family to learn the calls I didn't want to rely solely on BirdNET It occurred to me that I had the perfect tool for learning the calls of birds in my local area.
BirdNET-Go records the audio for each bird detection and stores it so that you can play it back to determine if the detection is accurate or not.That meant that I was sitting on hundreds of audio clips of real birds singing close to my home, with each audio clip identified as a specific bird.I wondered if I could create a simple game that would help my family and me learn the calls of some of the more common birds.
That way, we'd be able to recognize them when we were out and about, even without BirdNET to help us.I wanted to set something up that would play a real audio clip of an identified bird and then give four options of what that bird could be.We would then have to select which bird we thought it was and would get instant feedback about whether we were right or not.
Over time, we should be able to learn a lot of the calls.Since it's 2026, my immediate thought was to ask an AI chatbot to vibe code it for me, so that's exactly what I did.I told Codex my plan, and pointed it at my BirdNET-Go container so it could take a look at what audio was available.
I expected Codex to come back and reveal what it had found and give me a plan of how we could build the game that I wanted.To my surprise, Codex didn't do this.Instead, it provided me with a link to a fully working version of the game I was imagining in my head.
The vibe-coded game is simple but effective We're already identifying calls in the wild Close The first version of the game was almost exactly what I wanted.Each question had a playable audio clip containing a bird call, and four options of what the bird might be.Selecting one of the options would immediately tell me if I was right or wrong, and then move on to another question.
I only had to ask Codex for two small tweaks.The first was that when I clicked the audio clip, the play icon didn't change, so it looked like the audio wasn't playing.The second was to limit the questions to birds that had more than 100 detections, since it was asking about obscure birds that had only been heard once or twice.
Raspberry Pi 5 Brand Raspberry Pi Storage 8GB It's only recommended for tech-savvy users, but the Raspberry Pi 5 is a tinkerer's dream.Cheap, highly customizable, and with great onboard specs, it's a solid base for your next mini PC.8GB $199 at Amazon Expand Collapse A simple idea has become a really useful tool We've been using the game as a family every day, and we've already learned the calls of a lot of birds.
It's really awesome to be out in nature, hear some birdsong, and be able to say with confidence exactly which bird it is.
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