How AI is helping advance the science of bioacoustics to save endangered species
DeepMind’s new Perch AI supercharges conservation by rapidly decoding vast wildlife audio—from Hawai‘i’s honeycreepers to coral‐reef sounds. Trained on twice as much data (birds, mammals, amphibians, even human noise), it outperforms previous models in species ID, adapts to underwater environments and can answer questions like “how many babies?” It’s open‐sourced on Kaggle and already powers tools at Cornell’s BirdNet and BirdLife Australia, helping discover lost Plains Wanderer populations and monitor honeycreepers 50× faster. Agile modeling lets scientists build custom classifiers in under an hour.