How about a feature to identify birds by listening to their songs like the popular Shazam app does for music?
A. Its a cool idea, but there are some issues that make it very difficult. The Shazam program takes advantage of a large digital library of music that can be compared to the sounds received by the iPhone microphone. And since digital music is like a finger print the comparison process can be very accurate. Bird calls and songs on the other hand are more complex than human speech. Not only does every species have a repertory of sounds – no two birds sound alike. Indeed the same species of bird in the same area can have different dialects. Then there is the problem of the iPhone microphone, its just not up to the job of isolating a bird song from background noise. For that you need a special parabolic mic and a high gain amplifier with filters to remove noise. There are other reasons that make this difficult that are fairly technical So while we expect someday this will be feasible for now its remains on the wish list for great ideas.
