the BirdNET

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

What I Built

TrailCall is an offline bird-call companion for walks. You record a short clip on the trail, and it identifies the birds singing around you, then turns the detections into a short field note and adds them to your personal life list.

The screen is the shortest part of the experience: tap record, put the device away, and keep walking. The detail only appears once you're back or at a rest stop. The goal is to make people look up and listen instead of scrolling.

It's for beginner birders, students, and anyone who hears a call and wonders "what is that?", especially in places with weak or no signal.

Field test: [TODO: where you went, how long, how many species it identified, what it got wrong. Write this from your real outing.]

How I Built It

• Detection: BirdNET-Analyzer, an open-source bird sound classifier, runs fully locally on audio clips in Python.
• Field notes: a small open-weight model (e.g. Qwen2.5 or Llama 3.2 via Ollama) turns the raw detections (species, confidence, time) into a readable note with a short, plain-language fact about each bird.
• Storage: a local SQLite life list with date, species, and confidence.
• Interface: a minimal Streamlit page (or CLI) with a record/upload button and a life-list view.
• Flow: record clip → BirdNET detections → confidence filter → local LLM writes the note → save to SQLite.

Everything runs on a laptop with no internet connection.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

• Works where there's no signal. A cloud API is useless on a trail. Local models mean it works exactly where birds are.
• Your recordings and locations stay with you. Sightings and GPS context are sensitive, and nothing is uploaded to a server you don't control.
• Zero running cost. There's no per-call fee, so people can use it on every walk.
• Swappable and tunable. I can swap the language model, change the note style, or later fine-tune on local species without waiting on a vendor.
• Licensing note: BirdNET's model weights are released under a non-commercial license, so this is a learning and community tool, not a commercial product.

Prize Categories

[TODO: list the partner categories you're entering, or remove this section]