BirdNET-Go

BirdNET-Go is a free, self-hosted application that listens to your surroundings and identifies birds, bats and other wildlife by sound, in real time, around the clock. With more than 2,300 GitHub stars and active development continuing into 2026, it brings the BirdNET acoustic AI models to a single Go binary that runs happily on a Raspberry Pi.

Overview

Point a microphone at your garden and BirdNET-Go does the rest: it captures audio continuously, runs local AI inference to recognize species, and logs detections with confidence scores in a web dashboard. Multiple acoustic models are supported, including BirdNET for birds and models covering bats and other wildlife, and everything runs on-device — no audio leaves your network. Detections can flow outward through integrations such as MQTT and BirdWeather, notifications alert you to interesting visitors, and a built-in soundscape analysis makes it as useful for ecological monitoring as for backyard birding.

Key Features

• Real-time, 24/7 identification of birds and wildlife by sound
• Multi-model local AI inference, including BirdNET and bat models
• Runs on a Raspberry Pi as a single self-contained Go binary
• Web dashboard with detection history and confidence scores
• Integrations with MQTT, BirdWeather and notification services
• Fully private: all audio analysis happens on your own hardware

💳 Pricing

BirdNET-Go is free and open source; the only cost is a Raspberry Pi-class computer and a USB microphone.

Who Is It For

BirdNET-Go is for birders, garden wildlife enthusiasts and ecologists who want a permanent listening post that tells them which species visit, sing or hunt around their home or field site.