Haikubox Review: High-Tech Backyard Birding

Birds can be identified by their song for bird watchers. Some people can hear a song and remember it forever. If you're like me, you might have thought, "Why isn't there a way to tell a bird's name?" Someone can figure out how to identify a song with a few seconds of bad audio playing over some speakers, just like someone can figure out how to identify a bird singing in a tree.

That is what the creators of the Haikubox have done.

It's welcome and remarkable, but the Haikubox is more than that. One of the rare pieces of technology that increases your connection to the world around you is it.

There is a neural net.

Early this year, bird migration began. I am aware of this because of my Haikubox telling me. New warblers are arriving by the middle of August and will be heading to their winter grounds in Central and South America.

I don't have time to go birdwatching every day because I have a full time job. When the Cape May warblers arrived at the end of August, I would have missed them. I thought they stayed a mile up the road. They pass by my home in the mornings thanks to the Haikubox. The Haikubox made meTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,Trademarkia,

The magic of the Haikubox is expanding your world.

The Haikubox is rather dull in appearance. The box is about 2 inches thick. There is a sealed exit for the power cord on the bottom. I have had no problems with the device in the rain and the company recommends keeping it out of the sun. Don't let it get wet. Plug it in and connect it to your wi-fi network with the Haikubox connect app. The audio will be recorded 24/7.

The magic isn't at the end of the hardware. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a server for the Haikubox.

The Ornithology Lab has thousands of birdsong samples and a neural net for processing them. Neural networks are a form of machine-learning software well suited to recognizing patterns in audio—it's how Siri and Google Assistant understand your voice. Likewise, the neural net can filter out bird songs from background noise. In order to find patterns, it first needs to learn what the pattern is. Cornell's library of birdsong recordings provides the training that the AI needs to learn which sounds are bird songs and which ones are you watering the garden.

Cornell has been making changes to its neural net. If you want to experience this without investing in a Haikubox, you can grab Cornell's Merlin Bird ID app, which uses a small subset of the data and an artificial intelligence processor similar to what the Haikubox uses. BirdNet for Haikubox is a modified version of BirdNet, according to David Mann.

BirdNet and BirdNet for Haikubox aren't perfect, but they're pretty accurate most of the time. The Haikubox app can be used to improve the artificial intelligence.

There are multiple views.

If you want to see which birds your Haikubox has heard and tried to identify, you can use the Haikubox app or website. You can log in from any device if you set up an account first. All three of the apps have the same data and I used them all in my testing. I preferred to explore the species info in the web app since I could open eBird and other extra info in background tabs.