Today marks the release of A2O Search, a project I have been working on throughout the year. A2O Search aims at simplifying the examination of wild life audio recordings by providing an audio search engine: Upload a recording of a known bird to find the locations, times and recordings of similar wildlife sounds throughout Australia.
Tom Denton writes for the Google Blog:
Today, we’re expanding this collaboration with the launch of A2O Search. This new sound search engine, built with Google AI, allows researchers and scientists to search through millions of hours of Australian wildlife audio collected by the Australian Acoustics Observatory (A2O).
Traditionally, researchers analysed wildlife audio by manually listening through hours of audio clips to identify an animal sound. This painstaking and laborious process posed barriers for research and has hindered land management decisions. Even with the introduction of machine learning tools for classification, collecting training data is an enormous undertaking and limits the number and kinds of questions that scientists can answer.
And the Queensland University of Technology writes;
A2O Search will enable nonprofits, universities, and governments to easily search millions of hours of audio from the Australian Acoustics Observatory and will be open sourced to the broader research community to help influence decisions about land and wildlife management.
Researchers can simply upload audio recordings of a species to find similar sounds across the database, filter by location and date, and download results for other systems. This allows researchers to draw rich insights and save time and resources.