Improved bird recognition, sidekick and portal

by Shaun Ryan 06, May 2025

We have released a number of software improvements to our offering. This includes:

Improvements to the bird recognition algorithms
Improvements to the next version of our portal
Improvements to the Cacophony Sidekick app

Improved bird recognition

The bird processing algorithm has been adjusted to be a little more conservative. It will only suggest birds that are expected to be found in your region and the confidence levels for tagging a bird have been raised. So you should get less false positives. This means someone in New Zealand won't be told they have a Norfolk Island Whistler.

For now we have added Tui to the list of birds that we recognise and removed Bellbird. We are planning to have them both recognised before too long.

We're still playing around to optimise this, but we think it's an improvement over what we had. It was mentioned in our April newsletter that we have access to DOC bird recordings. We haven't yet incorporated these into the bird recognition algorithm.

Improvements to the Cacophony Portal

We've made a suite of small changes to the next version of the Cacophony Portal as we get closer to making this the default and retiring the older version.

Improved photo overlay

In February we introduced the ability to overlay a transparent photo over a thermal video. We've made it so these photos are shown by default, with a reasonable transparency setting. We've moved the transparency slider below the video and it remembers the setting between videos. You can remove or add the overlay photo by clicking the icon.

Stopped device emails work in audio only mode

We send out an email letting you know that we haven't heard from a camera if it hasn't connected to our servers for more than 25 hours. If a DOC AI Cam was in audio only mode then it doesn't check in that often. We've fixed this by changing the time we wait in this situation to 48 hours. This should stop the unnecessary emails going out (sorry David).

Tracking improvements

We've made some tweaks to our tracking algorithm that means there should be less tracks created. This should reduce the number of times a small movement is incorrectly classified as animal.

We've also sped up our processing, of the tracks and classifying. This is important as we get more videos being uploaded, as more cameras are being used.

Miscellaneous improvements

We've adjusted the layout for mobile phones, hopefully making it easier for review and tagging videos on mobile phones.

We've added controls to change the size of a track on audio recordings. The control is on the bottom right below the spectrogram.

We've improved the way the volume is adjusted and removed the volume control. You can just use your device volume control.

We now show battery levels for devices that have been offline for less than a month

We had inadvertently stopped calculating the Cacophony Index on audio recordings. This has been fixed now (sorry again, David).

Sidekick improvements

A new version of Sidekick (3.13) has been released on Android and iOS. This continues our work to improve the usability of the DOC AI Cam by making the app easier to use.

Password remembering and resetting

The Sidekick App now remembers your password, using whatever password manger you choose. Passwords are the bane of modern life and I find it frustrating when an app doesn't let you remember your password (I'm looking at you NZ Blood). It was always on our list of things to do but it required a little bit of work and hadn't made it to the top of our list until I saw a customer struggling to log into the app recently.

We've also added the ability to reset your password from the app.

5 Min bird recordings

We've made it easy to do 5 minute audio recordings. There is a button on the audio tab to start it off. The test recording button has been relabelled to 10s. Now it's obvious how long it will record for.

Notification to upload recordings

If you have recordings that have been downloaded to your phone then we will give you a reminder notification to upload them. For those interested, the background image is the reflection of Aoraki and Mount Tasman as seen from Lake Matheson.