The Sunday News
Bruce Chimani Sunday Leisure Correspondent
LOCAL app developer, Gift Gana, has released a revolutionary bird identification software set to make life easier for bird-watchers and also fly the Zimbabwean flag high in the global technology sector.
Gana, the chief executive officer of Avelgood Apps, an app development company he founded in 2008 and has also co-founded Football Zone, a football information start-up based in Bulawayo released the app, Twigle, live on Windows Phone Store on 16 April.
“Twigle is a revolutionary birding app that performs automatic bird song identification.
It records the singing of a bird, and identifies the bird in seconds,” said Gana.
Bird song identification is useful for the many times when you can’t see the bird but can hear it singing. What sets Twigle apart from other birding apps is its ability to record a singing bird and identify the bird by its sound. The app is expected to be popular among tourists who might not be able to identify certain birds they are not familiar with.
“It pretty much does for birds what music recognition apps do for music. We developed the app via Avelgood Apps and the app is available to download for free. Twigle returns the correct bird in the top 10 about 70 percent of the times. The total number of birds that Twigle’s database has is about 300 and those that it can recognise using audio recognition is currently about 100 species, representing European and North American birds,” he added.
Gana’s innovation comes at a time when talk of Africa’s emerging technophilics have been urged to use mobile application technology to solve some of Africa’s problems.
“Twigle pushes the boundaries of what we can do with our smartphones”, said Gana.
He added: “We do note that the performance is not yet at par with what music recognition apps can do, but it’s a huge step in making the task of identifying birds easier. We have just made easier the answer to the question ‘What’s that bird?’: ‘Just Twigle it!”
Gana pointed out that for scenarios when bird song recognition is not possible, for example when there is a lot of noise or for species that are not yet in the audio recognition database, Twigle incorporates features found in traditional birding apps that allow the user to input the bird’s features like size, feather colours, habitat, etc. and the app will find birds that match those features.
The feat that the company has taken is set to encourage many other local app developers to take to their computers and develop applications that will enhance the country’s agricultural, educational and tourism sectors.
