Amazon’s Alexa Is Ready to Help You Learn Bird Calls
“Alexa, ask APP to play .”
With those eight words, Amazon’s voice-activated assistant gives you one of the sweetest songs on the planet.
“Alexa, ask APP to play .”
With that, you're whiskedaway to a beach in Monterrey, where plovers scurry between dune and wave.
That’s the kind of effect Ed Norris wantedwhen he designed the APP Bird Songs Alexa skill. The software architect, who splits his time between Ohio and Kentucky, loves to study birds on his fishing and camping trips. Hearing the species’ voices, he says, helps pull him back to those places.
Which is where Alexa comes in. At first, Norrisused the technology to fetch sounds from Google searches—but the results weren’t always accurate. So, hedecided to cut out the middleman by “teaching” Alexa to link common species names back to the APP Guide to North American Birds. The APP went all inon the offer, granting him access to thousands of clipsrecorded by .It took Norris about a week to program the commands; refining them, however, took months.
Here’s how the call-and-response system works. Norris recreated the APP songlibrary within the Alexa universeandbuilt a custom skill to read any“ask APP" request.The softwarethen accessesAmazon’s Cloud-based services, pullingthe correct audio for Alexa to broadcast through an Echo or Dot device.
Of course, this all happens in a fraction of a second, so the user experience is simple and streamlined. All a bird enthusiast has to do is say, “Alexa, ask APP to play [insert common species name]“ or “Alexa, ask APP what a [insert common species name] sounds like.” If there are multiple calls and songs, Alexa will rotatethrough when told to “play the next one.”
The rate of successis high, Norris says, but there are some variables. To start, Alexaneeds to get accustomed to the owner’s voice and dialect (this can be done by reading off a standard list of phrases during setup). Norris also taught the softwareto pick up 69 different utterances, which means there’s some leeway in how the commands can be given. Finally, there are a few bird names that are hard to translate: Northern Saw-whet Owl, Pyrruhloxia, and even Snowy Plover may be met with an awkward Alexa silence. To tackle those species, dictate each word slowly (even robotshave a slight learning curve).
For his part, Norris is tracking every delivery from the APP libraryto log any errors and misses. And when he’s not improving the skill, he reaps its rewards by having Alexa recreate the chatterfrom the three feeders in his yard. “I hope people can use this tool to learn that communication in the bird worldisa lot larger than they realize,” Norris says. Alexa, can we get an amen?
***
Freebie Alert!Downloadto start learning821 North American species and their songstoday.