I Went Birding With the Worlds First AI-Powered Binoculars

The Austrian company Swarovski Optik has been innovating in long-range optical instruments for 75 years. Now, like so many other well-established companies these days, it’s dipping into the world of artificial intelligence to enhance its latest product.

Earlier this year, the company released the AX Visio, a pair of AI-powered binoculars codeveloped with the famed Australian industrial designer Marc Newson. These are the world’s first pair of AI binoculars, the company claims, with an onboard computer that can identify nearly any bird you point them at. They have a built-in camera and use computer vision software to ID over 9,000 bird species in real time. They can also identify some mammals and insects, making them possible the most useful binoculars for observing wildlife.

The AX Visio are available now and are unlike anything else on the market, and that uniqueness comes with a hefty price tag: A pair will set you back €4,600, which is a little over $5,000.

Got Some ID?

Identifying animals in the wilderness can be a challenge when you’re experiencing the great outdoors without a guide and you come across an unfamiliar creature that you can’t recognize based on its appearance, behavior, or sounds. While the AX Visio can’t replace a guide’s knowledge of local species, anecdotes about flora and fauna, and a keenly trained eye for wildlife behavior, the device can give you some instant gratification by identifying various species. It has settings for birds, mammals, butterflies, and dragonflies, and it uses image-recognition models stored on software that’s installed in the onboard chips.

For bird identification when the Bird ID setting is active, the AX Visio uses a modified version of Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID’s extensive bird database. The Mammals ID, Butterfly ID, and Dragonfly ID settings on the binoculars are powered by the Sunbird database. However, while mammals and flying insects can currently only be identified in Europe and North America, the Bird ID software works everywhere—even Antarctica.

The identification apps use a combination of image recognition and geolocation, which is enabled by a built-in GPS sensor that tells the software where you are in the world. That can help it narrow down which species you’re probably looking at.

Looking Out

I’m an amateur bird watcher, and I got a chance to test out the AX Visio in the field at andBeyond Phinda Private Game Reserve in South Africa. (Swarovski flew me down there to test the binoculars in the field.) Guests at the reserve can currently rent the binoculars for $40 per day, with the proceeds benefiting local conservation projects.

Initially, I was overwhelmed by using a pair of binoculars powered by technology; I was worried it would be hard to master the camera and species identification. Fortunately, they’re quite user-friendly. On the bridge of the binoculars is the mode-selection wheel, which is easily rotated to move between the AX Visio’s settings, including the species identification modes for birds, mammals, butterflies, and dragonflies. There is also a mode for photography, which uses the onboard camera to snap a photo, and other settings.

For proper identification, the binoculars must be held steady and focused properly so the imaging system has a clear shot of the animal. When you point the binoculars at a bird, a red circle appears in your field of vision, and as long as the animal fills up most of that circle then it’s close enough to identify. Press the raised button on the top of the binoculars and within a few seconds, the name of the creature will be displayed on the screen.

I was impressed that the binoculars accurately identified very small birds. The AX Visio correctly identified a 5-inch-long malachite kingfisher which was clearly visible on a branch above the water 30 meters away. Later, I spotted a 9-inch-long bee-eater camouflaged in a tree 100 meters away, but it was too far for the AX Visio to identify the bird. Frustratingly, sometimes a bird would be clearly visible within the red circle but the binoculars would display an error message that there was no bird to identify.

Beyond that glitch, the bird recognition wasn’t always accurate. In my experience, the AX Visio identified a bird correctly about 60 to 70 percent of the time. Another pair of binoculars that had already had an upcoming software update installed provided accurate IDs about 80 to 90 percent of the time. There will be several firmware updates a year, which load onto the binoculars over Bluetooth. A recent update in August included video stabilization. Future updates to the object-recognition system will improve the accuracy of the identification engine and include ID information for more species.

As I was on safari game drives, I could point to the bird I had captured on the AX Visio and ask the andBeyond guides the name of the bird, to verify if the AX Visio bird identification was correct. When it was wrong, it often had the species correct but not the specific bird. For instance, the AX Visio identified a coucal correctly but categorized it as white-browed coucal, which doesn’t occur on Phinda. The andBeyond guides confirmed it was actually a Burchell’s coucal. Another time the AX Visio identified a brown-hooded kingfisher as a gray-headed kingfisher.

On the safari, the andBeyond guides tried the AX Visio binoculars and raved about the function that allowed them to share locations of specific species with their guests. The “share discoveries” function pins the precise whereabouts of an animal. The binoculars can then be handed over to someone else who can follow the onscreen arrows to be guided back to the spot where the creature is located.

Long-Distance Vision

It took five years to develop these debut smart binoculars. They feature high-performance analog long-range optics with a 112-meter field of view at 1,000 meters, 10X magnification, and 32-millimeter objective lenses. The onboard camera captures 13-megapixel photos and 1080p video.

Users can view their images and videos off the device by connecting the AX Visio with the Swarovski Optik Outdoor App, which is available for iOS and Android. The files on the app include the species identification in the metadata, but when the images are downloaded to your mobile phone, only the location data can be accessed, not the ID. The quality of the video and imagery is impressive with enhanced clarity and contrast, but the AX Visio won’t give you professional-quality photographs. The photos are good enough to share on social media or make small prints, however.

I loved not having to juggle my camera, binoculars, and cell phone to take photos of birds and write down the names of the species I spotted. The ability to witness, identify, and document bird species simultaneously saved me precious time to observe flighty wildlife, and I never had to switch between devices and potentially miss a moment. The innovation of AX Visio marks a paradigm shift in the technology of binoculars by making them a more useful tool able to seamlessly identify animals and capture images and video on the same device.