My mother loves birds, and loves all the features of this app. Few suggestions: 1) setting to ignore alerts form squirrels. She gets so excited when there is a new notification, but is let down when it’s just some clever squirrel. 2) an alert when the camera has been disconnected or dislodged from the housing. A low battery alert would be nice if it doesn’t already exist 3) I like how you can “collect” birds, but it would be great if the app told you how many different types are in your area so you know, for example, you’ve collected 27 out of 35 birds in your area, and would allow you to see which birds in your area you still need to collect (maybe even indicate how we could attract them). 4) I wish there was a live feed feature, that would allow you to quickly connect, but I understand that would probably impact battery life 5) ability to rank bird pictures in the community. With awards, for example, best bird of the day.
ADDENDUM: A new version was just released that fixes my issues below. Much improved, now 5 stars!
Overall it is a lot of fun to be able to see birds up close. It takes great pictures and the solar panel works great. Before I had the solar panel the battery life was limited and I had to recharge every few days. A few kind of annoying things: 1) The biggest one is that there is no way to “mute” or silence birds. As a result you get tons of alerts/postcards of the same species (in my case house finches). Each requires multiple taps. It would be really nice if you could group or mute birds so it takes pictures, but you can see them only if you want to (ie. “House finches came to your feeder 15 times today, click here to see the pictures”). Then you can still see the pics, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time clicking through the same species 15 times per day. 2) The identification algorithm is good but not great. Biggest issue I have with it is that it will identify birds as a species that are not found anywhere around where I live (for example, it will identify birds here in the Pacific NE as a bird found only in Florida). Granted weird things happen but geographic location should be a pretty big factor in the ID. Overall is fun, and worth the purchase, but the details are still being worked on.
This Bird Buddy is a great idea. For the most part, this thing work great, but as most have said, it does miss some birds. I don’t know what triggers this thing to record and take pictures, but it does miss a lot. How do I know? I watch activity from my living room, so I know. The app is pretty clunky, not user friendly. Clicking through hundreds of “Postcards” can be annoying. Contrary to what some users have said, pictures can be deleted, but it takes to many clicks to get there. Other than that, I ordered a package with every accessory, but have yet to receive any of the accessories! The last comment; the solar panel works like a dream! No more charging for me! Overall, a great idea and great product! The app needs some work, but I would expect to see improvement forthcoming.
I enjoy the bird feeder so far, but I don’t have a good user experience within this app. It takes too long to open a postcard. It was exciting on the first day watching the animation while opening a postcard, but it gets old quickly. After we have the bird feeder set up, for 99.9% of the time it’s the same birds showing up. But we have to watch that animation every single time time when a bird visits. There should be an option to skip that animation. What’s worse, I have to label the bird in every single photo, even though we already know what the bird is in the first photo. There should be an option that allows user to identify birds in multiple photos at the same time, instead of one photo at a time. It has become so time consuming to open photos that I don’t feel like checking new postcards any more. Why can’t we just simply have a library of photos without any redundant animations??
I have a very active feeder with a generally the same population of birds/species visiting regularly. The app treats each of those as a “present” for me to open/reveal. After a busy week of not tending to the app I now have hundreds of these presents to open. I want this app to treat all known birds like a photo feed - just show me the photos. Give me easy tools to remove photos i don’t like or want to keep. Same for the videos. When there are birds that can’t be identified due to backlighting or shadows, have those show up in a filtered view so i can identify them or delete them. When there is a new bird that i haven’t seen before or don’t see often maybe then use the “gift” animation for revealing them. I absolutely respect the work this team has done on the hardware/firmware side - my kickstarter edition feeder went from needing to be charged daily to now not having been charged in weeks due to optimizations in the firmware that have really made the solar a must-have feature. At present though (pun not intended) the app design is tiresome and saps the joy from using my feeder.
BirdBuddy gives an exceptional close-up view of birds. The physical device -- bird feeder with camera -- is truly Great. The app is necessary to see pictures and video, but creates an endless stream of data which must be "accepted" -- *one image at a time* -- by a live person, making it a time-sucking nuisance. Bird identification automation is better than expected. Would really help if it could better apply its smarts to catalog all data, maybe discarding images it is sure are junk (as it already does for the most part), but otherwise letting users see everything all at once, and be able to delete unwanted acquisitions. Postcards metaphor is cute and a nice idea, but the human cost of being forced to process everything is infuriating. Doesn't actually send postcards... it sends invitations to go curate the latest acquisitions... which makes them much less welcome... but the video and images are wonderful. BirdBuddy, PLEASE take the human out of the loop -- save everything and let us delete bad shots (there are very few, your software does well with that). Send actual images (postcards), not dreaded demands to go make pictures viewable.
The concept is very cool, of course. But the app needs a ton of further development. I think it was a little rushed to market. It’s not as intuitive as it should be, requires too many clicks for basic functions, needs a more robust video playback (for example: frame-by-frame scrolling, snap a photo within a video — and i should be able to create a new visitor from this, as multiple birds are sometimes shown in one video.)
There doesn’t seem to be a way to delete a new bird category when one has been created by accident. If I have miss identified a bird, and then figure it out, I can’t move that photo into its correct bird gallery; an error message says first I have to change the gallery cover photo. But there seems to be no way to do this either.
I have a lot more suggestions, but hopefully the developers are already working on all of this and more. Once the novelty wears off, these multiple minor frustrations will add up quickly and sharply reduce usage.
If I had listened to the reviews I would have missed out on this great product that brings great joy to my whole family.
We received bird buddy within a month. It took five minutes to set up a little longer to charge up the first time. The charge lasts about 2-3 days. We were already feeding birds in our yard so we had an established community. If you are not seeing birds early on you may want to set up a feeder nearby to attract the birds to the bird buddy. We have seen an arsenal of birds up close and personal. The feeder cup makes adding seed to the Seed feeder meat and easy.
Removing and charging the camera also very easy. The app is easy to use with entertaining graphics. This is a great product. If you love to feed birds in your yard you will love it. The app can be shared with three people who can see your post cards but not the live feed.
I check in from time to time now, as the same types of birds visit daily. I still enjoy seeing them. I’m limited in the food I can put in the tray so not to attract starlings. I definitely don’t need or like the video feature. I would like a setting to opt-out of video, or at least restrict to the type of bird to video or how often. It’s so difficult to plug in charger and I have to have to plug it in more often to feed the video - a negative. Is there a clear roof option that allows more light to the feeding tray? My photos are on the darker side since we have many cloudy winter days.
I will admit that when I first got bird buddy it was a bit of a struggle to set up. The camera didn’t work correctly. We had to return and get it replaced.
But then when we finally got a working camera. We bought some third-party attachments so that the birdhouse would sit securely.
And after my millennial mania was over due to being terrible at fixing things this thing turned out to be amazing.
I am the least handy person in Massachusetts and was able to rig the bird house so it’s secure on a pole.
So if I can do this, 99.9% of the world can.
I highly recommend getting the solar panel bird house so you don’t have to manually recharge every week.
The pictures are high quality. The videos look like they’re 1080p, but don’t quote me on that. After a couple days we had birds coming to it constantly. Very cool how the app can identify them, or if you disagree with the species the app says then you can forward to the Bird Buddy team to confirm.
I may buy a second one of these someday if the price dips.
CharlieWhelan
JK62202
FL Birdman
songbono
smbr-35321
emark
Vhkfssrtbbbbbbbb
Marjulc
JS-MO
Boston Jew
