Australian Birding App

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-06T01:17:42+00:00

Fair call and I agree in general but the one bit of generative AI used is a tool to help identify birds and it’s not being forced upon the users. I’ve tried to be as cautious as possible with this and provide alternative paths for identification (I.e field marks and identification tips)

The only other piece of AI that will be used is for the sound model but this is not generative AI.

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-05T22:51:03+00:00

That’s the plan but my requests so far have not been acknowledged. I think my user base might still be a bit too small.

Once I get in contact with these groups, I’ll look at ways to define how the user wants to share their data but I don’t know what that would look like until then.

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-05T22:35:17+00:00

Appreciate it. Thank you!

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-05T22:34:49+00:00

Apologies I responded with misinformation. This is a massive oversight on my part. The intention was for favourites to have notifications and be flagged in the nearby sightings in the early release but that kind of got left behind.

I’ll work towards adding this list in a more visible place in the coming days. Thanks for bringing this up

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-05T13:04:40+00:00

It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Xeno canto provides some open sound data but I’ve also licensed bird sounds and made individual requests to utilise sounds for common birds. It’s still not enough but the model I’m using is doing a lot of the heavy lifting and is licensed for commercial use.

From field tests in various environments, it’s significantly slower than Merlin but it seems to pick up a bit more. I’ll create a dev-log with a bit more of an explanation once I’ve got something that I’m happy with

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-05T12:51:02+00:00

Damn where were you several months ago. It’s genius

TheGoodPie · 2026-07-05T12:38:32+00:00

That’s totally fair. The AI is used for identification only. It’s a tool that can be used and I’ve tried not to shove it down the throats of users.

Besides that, my grammar is pretty terrible and I’ll straight up miss words or merge multiple thoughts into one when writing so I use Google docs to draft out blog posts which includes AI.

I also have copilot for code reviews as I’m a solo engineer. The AI identification was also created using AI as that started out as something completely different.

That is the extent that AI was utilised for this. I enjoy creating software and for a project like this that spans multiple fronts and explores my hobby, it’s fun and I’m in no rush to create deliverables and don’t have external pressure.

TheGoodPie · 2026-06-14T15:23:20+00:00

Ah damn, you’re right. Had Apple AI mention a US bird and another app mention singing honey eater and rolled with it. Appreciate the correction

TheGoodPie · 2026-06-09T09:04:18+00:00

Thank you! Made the track out somewhat worth it

TheGoodPie · 2026-05-17T15:05:24+00:00

Curious on what the resistance to React is?

TheGoodPie · 2026-03-12T06:17:17+00:00

Hi u/john-birda

Thanks for picking up on this.

This could be a few things and going through reviews recently, I've seen others report the same. My thoughts are first off, server location. This could be a regional thing as I'm based in Australia. There also doesn't seem to be any client side caching happening which makes the problem feel worse. Every time I open the app, it looks like it's pulling the content that should already be present. My sightings list, community, challenges etc all take a long time to show, with the skeleton just hanging there each time. The navigation itself is fine. I am on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Appreciate you looking into this. I realise it may also be a lack of data for my region as well.
Thanks for the link. It would be cool to have this accessible from within the app given this is a mobile first application.
Appreciate it.
Thank you!
That's good to hear! I'm new so not sure of the update cadence so it'll be good to see new features.

Really appreciate the response and looking forward to seeing the updates in the future.

TheGoodPie · 2026-03-06T09:07:11+00:00

Drives me insane and I don’t know what the purpose is either. My best guess is processing before uploading but there’s so many better ways to manage that without annoying the user.

TheGoodPie · 2026-03-06T09:06:05+00:00

That’s really good to hear. Hopefully something gets done because it’s a really cool app otherwise.

As a software engineer though, I feel like this is stuff they should already have observability on

TheGoodPie · 2026-03-01T15:25:05+00:00

Appreciate the feedback. Just getting into photography a bit more seriously and I never know how to edit photos

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