Wouldn’t it be cool if you could point your phone at a plant or animal and it could tell you what you are looking at? Well, now, you can. Seek uses a computer vision algorithm, along with the species list for your area based on iNaturalist platform observations to give you its best guess as to what you are looking at. Considering that professional taxonomists can have a hard time (or even simply cannot) identify many organism from an image, what this app can do is pretty impressive. The app is available for both iOS and Android devices and gives you a live camera view along with IDs. This is an upgrade over the iNaturalist app model that requires you to take a photo first and then wait for an ID.
Unlike the iNaturalist app, is not intended for children under 13 because of concerns over the need to provide location along with observations, the Seek app does not share location information. The end result is a kid-friendly field guide on a device that gives real-time feedback on what you are seeing. What a great way to get kids engaged in seeking out (and identifying) biodiversity.
Read more about Seek on the iNaturalist blog, along with some videos of the app in action: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/23075-real-time-computer-vision-predictions-in-seek-by-inaturalist-version-2-0