Comment by Sesse__
2 hours ago
For me, mostly a lot of false negatives. I have a Pixel 8, and I have no problems using the microphone normally, but somehow, Merlin requires the bird to be within a couple of meters of me and sing for quite a while before Merlin will even say “hearing a bird”. And of course, you have to be dead silent; if anyone talks or coughs, it will mess up the spectogram badly.
Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” and Shazam is just amazingly resistant to noise, it's a bit disappointing :-)
I think what makes Shazam magically "just work" is that they are searching for the exact embedding of the recorded version of the song - it doesn't work for a cover version, acapella, etc even if it is very similar. (Everyone would want an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song, but I guess it's a very tough problem.)
Merlin is solving the more general problem so makes sense that it's much more finicky and less accurate.