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Faisal Ahmad
Faisal Ahmad

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WildEcho: Offline Backcountry Acoustic Nature Explorer & Eyes-Free Audio Field Guide

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #gemma #python

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

WildEcho 🌲🔊: Offline Backcountry Acoustic Nature Explorer & Eyes-Free Audio Field Guide

What I Built

Most outdoor and birding apps make the same mistake: they force you to pull a phone from your pocket, squint at a bright screen in midday sun, scroll through dropdowns, and tap buttons while the rare songbird you were listening to flutters away into the brush.

WildEcho flips the paradigm completely.

It is an eyes-free, 100% offline backcountry nature explorer designed around a single guiding principle:

"Slip your phone into your pocket, put on your earbuds, and listen to the forest. Touch grass without screen fatigue."

                              [ WILD FOREST SOUNDSCAPE ]
                         (Songbirds, Wind, Water, Distant Road)
                                          │
                                          ▼
                             [ Continuous Audio Buffer ]
                                          │
                                          ▼
                 ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                 │       Offline Bioacoustic Signal Processing      │
                 │                                                  │
                 │  • Welch Power Spectral Density (PSD)            │
                 │  • NDSI Index (Biophony 2–11kHz vs Anthrophony)  │
                 │  • ACI Complexity Index (Harmonic Temporal Flux) │
                 │  • Spectral Centroid & Resonance Peaks           │
                 └────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                                          │
                                          ▼
                 ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                 │        Offline Wildlife Biometric Matcher        │
                 │                                                  │
                 │  • 12 Embedded Native Species Signatures         │
                 │  • Harmonic Proximity & Peak Tracking            │
                 │  • Habitat (Forest/Wetland) & Seasonal Priors    │
                 └────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                                          │
                                          ▼
                 ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                 │      Google Gemma 2 Naturalist Reasoning Brain   │
                 │                                                  │
                 │  • Eyes-Free Spoken Whisper Prompt Contract      │
                 │  • Wild Foraging Clues (Chanterelles, Morels)    │
                 │  • Backcountry Trail Safety (Snags, Shaded Ledges│
                 └────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                                          │
                                          ▼
                 ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                 │             Eyes-Free Audio Delivery             │
                 │                                                  │
                 │  • ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 / Web Speech API Audio  │
                 │  • Shannon-Wiener Ecological Diversity Index (H) │
                 │  • Silent Offline JSON Waypoint Field Journal    │
                 └──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
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🌿 The Core Backcountry Experience:

  1. 📱 Phone in Pocket: Tuck your device away in your backpack or hip pocket. No screen glare, no menus, zero notification anxiety.
  2. 🎙️ 100% Offline Bioacoustics: Edge DSP algorithms compute soundscape purity (NDSI — Normalized Difference Soundscape Index) and songbird complexity (ACI — Acoustic Complexity Index) locally with zero cellular reception.
  3. 🎧 Google Gemma 2 Earbud Whispers: On-device open-weight LLM whispers concise, poetic audio notes (species name, foraging associations, and trail safety) into your wireless earbuds.
  4. 📊 Automatic Biodiversity Journal: Silently logs every waypoint encounter and calculates your trail's Shannon-Wiener Ecological Diversity Index ($H$) for review once you return home.

Demo

  • 🌐 Interactive Trail Explorer & Audio Simulator: Run locally via uv run wildecho serve --port 8000 (FastAPI + Tailwind + Web Speech API + Web Audio API frequency synthesizer).
  • 🌲 Terminal Eyes-Free Expedition Mode: 
  uv run wildecho listen --trail "Cascade Mountain Ridge" --habitat dense_forest --season autumn
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Live Simulation Output: 

+----------------------------- Expedition Active -----------------------------+
|  WILDECHO   - Offline Backcountry Acoustic Nature Explorer                  |
|  [Eyes-Free Mode] Phone in pocket, earbuds active. Touch grass.             |
|                                                                             |
|  Trail:     Cascade Mountain Ridge Walk                                     |
|  Habitat:   Dense Forest                                                    |
|  Season:    Autumn | Engine: Offline Gemma 2 & Edge Bioacoustics            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

---------------- Trail Waypoint #01 - Ambient Sampling Window -----------------
 Soundscape Quality:   Pristine Wilderness (92% Pure Nature)
 Biophony Index (NDSI): [-1.0 ==================>          +1.0] (+0.84)
 Acoustic Complexity:  14.5 ACI | Peak: 3402 Hz

                  Detected Biological Species (Bioacoustics)                   
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| #   | Common Name    | Scientific Name | Class     | Peak Freq | Confidence |
|-----+----------------+-----------------+-----------+-----------+------------|
| 1   | Wood Thrush    | Hylocichla      | BIRD      |   3402 Hz |      98.0% |
|     |                | mustelina       |           |           |            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+--------------------------- Earbud Audio Briefing ---------------------------+
|  [WHISPER DELIVERED TO EARBUDS]                                             |
|                                                                             |
| "Listen to the canopy. That liquid flute cascade is a Wood Thrush. Take a   |
| breath and enjoy the moment."                                               |
|                                                                             |
|  🍄 Foraging Clue: Mature deciduous canopy with deep leaf litter; prime     |
|     habitat for Chanterelles and Black Trumpet mushrooms.                   |
|  ⚠️ Trail Safety: Inhabits shaded interior woods; keep bearings on trail    |
|     landmarks.                                                              |
+----- Audio Duration: ~7.7s | Synthesized by Google Gemma 2 Edge ------------+
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Code

WildEcho is 100% open-source under the MIT license:

GitHub logo fab-c14 / wildecho

WildEcho 🌲🔊

Offline Backcountry Acoustic Nature Explorer & Eyes-Free Audio Field Guide

Built for Hacktoberfest 2026: Open-Source AI Challenge (Week 1: "Touch Grass")

Python 3.11+ Core Model: Google Gemma 2 Code Quality: Pylint 10.00/10 Linter: Ruff Audio Engine: ElevenLabs Deploy: Render Blueprint License: MIT

🌿 The Core Philosophy: "Touch Grass, Keep Screen in Pocket"

Modern outdoor and birding apps demand that you pull out your phone, unlock a bright glass screen under direct sunlight, navigate clunky menus, and squint at photos while the animal flees into the brush.

WildEcho flips the paradigm completely:

  • Zero Screen Time: Put your phone in your pocket or backpack with your wireless earbuds on. Touch grass, feel the breeze, and hike without digital fatigue.
  • Continuous Backcountry Listening: Passively samples environmental soundscapes in the background via local microphone buffers.
  • 100% Offline Bioacoustics Engine: Computes spectral power distributions, Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI), and Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) locally on edge hardware with zero cellular signal.
  • Open-Weight Gemma 2 Intelligence…
View on GitHub

🔗 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/fab-c14/wildecho

How I Built It

WildEcho unites mathematical bioacoustic signal processing, local on-device LLM reasoning, and modern web audio architecture:

1. 🔬 Bioacoustic Signal Processing Pipeline (wildecho/bioacoustics/)

  • Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI): Implements Bernie Krause's Acoustic Niche Hypothesis to separate human drone (Anthrophony: 50–1500 Hz) from biological calls (Biophony: 2000–11000 Hz): $$\text{NDSI} = \frac{\text{Biophony} - \text{Anthrophony}}{\text{Biophony} + \text{Anthrophony}}$$
  • Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI): Implemented based on Pieretti et al. (2011), tracking rapid sound intensity fluctuations across spectrogram bins to detect songbirds without being fooled by steady wind.
  • Embedded Wildlife Catalog: 12 native species across Birds, Amphibians, Mammals, and Insects with acoustic frequency profiles, harmonic ratios, and ecological associations.

2. 🧠 Google Gemma 2 Naturalist Reasoning Engine (wildecho/intelligence/)

  • Powered by Google Gemma 2 (google/gemma-2-2b-it).
  • Uses a strict Eyes-Free Audio Prompt Contract restricting responses to 2 conversational spoken sentences without markdown, plus wild edible foraging correlations and terrain safety advisories.
  • Fallback edge generation ensures 100% operation even on ultra-low-power edge hardware.

3. 🎧 Earbud Whisper Streaming (wildecho/audio/ & Web UI)

  • Streams lifelike naturalist narration into wireless earbuds via ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 when online.
  • In the companion web explorer, leverages native browser Web Speech API (window.speechSynthesis) and Web Audio API (AudioContext) to speak whispers and synthesize species sound calls directly in judges' headphones.

4. ☁️ Turnkey Deployment on Render (render.yaml)

  • Declared as an Infrastructure-as-Code service in render.yaml for automatic zero-downtime deployment on Render: 
services:
  - type: web
    name: wildecho
    env: python
    buildCommand: pip install uv && uv sync --no-dev
    startCommand: uv run uvicorn wildecho.web.app:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT
    plan: free
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Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

In backcountry wilderness, open-source AI is not an aesthetic preference — it is an absolute necessity:

  1. Backcountry Zero-Connectivity Execution: Closed APIs (OpenAI, Claude) require continuous internet. 10 miles deep in a national park with zero cellular towers, closed cloud models are completely dead. Open-weight models like Google Gemma 2 run locally on the hiker's device with zero latency and zero signal.
  2. Hiker Privacy & Location Sovereignty: Closed apps frequently beam GPS telemetry, timestamps, and audio to central clouds. WildEcho keeps 100% of location data, trail paths, and audio buffers local.
  3. Zero Cost & Free Public Science: Outdoor adventurers, conservation volunteers, and national park visitors shouldn't have to pay subscription token fees to learn about their local forest ecosystem.

Prize Categories

🌟 Featured Categories:

  • Best Use of Gemma ($200 USD): WildEcho runs Google Gemma 2 (gemma-2-2b-it) as its core ecological intelligence engine, translating acoustic frequency metrics into eyes-free naturalist field notes and foraging hints.
  • Best Use of Render ($200 USD): The companion explorer is declared via render.yaml, providing a one-click deployment blueprint for Render web services with automatic health monitoring.

🤝 Partner Categories:

  • Best Use of ElevenLabs ($100 USD): Powers the eyes-free earbud voice streaming pipeline using ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 (eleven_turbo_v2_5) for natural, low-latency audio briefings.

Try It Yourself 

# Clone and explore with uv in seconds:
git clone https://github.com/fab-c14/wildecho.git
cd wildecho
uv sync --all-extras
uv run wildecho listen --habitat dense_forest
# Or launch the interactive web companion:
uv run wildecho serve --port 8000
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Built with love for nature, open-weight AI, and the wilderness.

Keep your phone in your pocket, listen to the trees, and touch grass! 🌲🎧

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