Those who do this the analogue way, often distinguish between bird song and "bird language." The former focuses on identifying species. The latter focuses on understanding the information birds convey to one another. Since a lot of it relates to predators (watch out, a fox!), this might be augmentable to determine the presence of silent animals too.
I'd be interested in something like this to identify "dialects" in certain species of local birds. The bellbird/korimako[1] is well known for having distinct shared motifs within a given area.
The dialectal song differences are readily noticeable, but mapping the dialect boundaries between populations would be really interesting.
How hard would it be for an AI to identify specific information conveyed by a call? Perhaps the various alerts that birds provide local fauna would be helpful to humans too?
My intuition is that it would be no different than human speech recognition. You'd need sufficient data, but the principle is the same. There arn't that many "words."
Humans understanding bird calls isn't new. We've probably forgotten more than we know. That's not unique to us either. Different species often recognize each others' calls, particularly danger calls.
Those who do this the analogue way, often distinguish between bird song and "bird language." The former focuses on identifying species. The latter focuses on understanding the information birds convey to one another. Since a lot of it relates to predators (watch out, a fox!), this might be augmentable to determine the presence of silent animals too.
fun.