> I’ve never seen Merlin’s Sound ID produce an obviously-wrong identification
Well, good luck identifying mockingbirds, lol. But that's a tricky case.
Anyway, it's a nice way to use AI, unlike so many others that pop up lately.
I wish they'd open source it all though, especially if they are getting help from volunteers.
As a heavy user of Merlin, it definitely isn’t perfect - especially with all the mimic birds - to the point that there are complaints about beginners polluting the citizen science database with erroneous IDs from Merlin.
But it’s very very good.
Mockingbirds do a minimum of three repeats of any particular sound before moving onto the next. So the songs are done more times in a row than the real species would and then immediately it turns into a Robin (or something else). I'm sure there's subtle audio differences between a mockingbird and the real thing too that Merlin can detect.
A feature I'd love would be if Merlin told you the call the bird was making rather than just the bird ID. eg. "Blue Jay mimicking a Red Shouldered Hawk" would be a cool bit of info it could give since it really does catch the mimics out really well. It currently just says "Blue Jay" when it hears a blue jay trying to be a red shouldered hawk.
But I agree with you that it gets those things correct most of the time and it also seems to be improving over time.