Seek on Google Play Reviews

Seek v.2.4.5

iNaturalist

936 Ratings Category: Education Free

Top Dev :
Pegi : PEGI 3
Publish Date : Jan 18, 2019
Update Date : February 3, 2020
File Size : 33M
Version : 2.4.5
Installs : 100,000+
Op. System : 6.0 and up
Pysical Address :
Website URL : Click Here
Email Address : help+seek@inaturalist.org
Privacy Policy : Read...
Updated : 2020.02.09

All Versions

3.2

936 total

5

290
4

159
3

140
2

149
1

196

Description

Use the power of image recognition technology to identify the plants and animals all around you. Earn badges for seeing different types of birds, amphibians, plants, and fungi and participate in monthly observation challenges with Our Planet on Netflix.

• Get outside and point the Seek Camera at living things

• Identify wildlife and plants you see and take pictures to earn badges

• Learn fun facts about the organisms all around you

OPEN THE CAMERA AND START SEEKING!

Found a mushroom, flower, or bug, and not sure what it is? Open up the Seek camera to see if it knows!

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Scan the environment with the Seek Camera to identify organisms using the tree of life. Add different species to your observations and learn all about them in the process! The more observations you make, the more badges you’ll earn!

This is a great app for families who want to spend more time exploring nature together, and for anyone who wants to learn more about the life all around them.

KID-SAFE

Seek does not require registration and does not collect any user data by default. Some user data will be collected if you choose to sign in with an iNaturalist account, but you must be over 13 or have your parents permission to do so.

Seek will ask permission to turn on location services, but your location is obscured to respect your privacy while still allowing species suggestions from your general area. Your precise location is never stored in the app or sent to iNaturalist.

Our image recognition technology is based on observations submitted to iNaturalist.org and partner sites, and identified by the iNaturalist community.

Seek is presented by Our Planet and WWF and created by the iNaturalist team. iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Seek was originally created with support from HHMI Tangled Bank Studios.

What’s New

AR camera updates

Screenshot

Reviews

Seek

Customer Reviews

September 16, 2019

I really like this app. It's great to be able to identify the wildlife I see when I am out and about. Since I first installed it several months ago, the app has been getting better and better with more features all the time which is really great. I enjoy the monthly challenges that try to encourage you to look for specific sets of wildlife. The main issue I find with the app, is that everything seems to be saved locally, even if you have signed in with iNaturalist. I would love to be able to be able to sign in on other devices and keep all my observations and achievements but at the moment, this doesn't seem to be possible. This also means that if you remove one of the observation photos from your phone, you can no longer see the thumbnail photo of the observation. It would be good if there was an option to add extra photos to observations for situations like these.
September 13, 2019

My favorite resource for identifying both flora and fauna. It's not always right, but it gets it probably 90% of the time, which is pretty impressive. I always do secondary research on the app's guesses just to verify. At the very least, it gives a good starting point and speeds up research immensely.
September 09, 2019

The app is a lot of fun, and it recently became more useful with the improved camera control. It would still benefit from implementing more functions, like being able to enlarge images from the species description tab.
September 04, 2019

Its a great app to identify things but most of the time I can't get the camera to focus properly. The biggest problem I have is the battery usage. I've seen it use 5 percent of my battery within a couple minutes of using the app. Any other app doesn't do this with my phone (Google Pixel 2 XL). If there is a fix for this issue, I would like to know.
October 28, 2019

A few improvements could be made. 1st if the app incorrectly identifies something it doesn't seem easy to remove it from your observations. 2nd it seems to place lots of the same photo in different places on your phone which all appear in Google Photos which is annoying. It would be good if you could do some photo management or pick where it loads photos.
October 19, 2019

the best app ive found for identifying bugs tbh. even if it cant get an exact species, it makes a guess close enough for me to find it on my own. its helped me a bunch. very rarely does it get something completely wrong, and when it does, its usually because i put in a blurry/unclear picture on accident. its not great for plants in my experience, but i imagine thats really hard. but for bugs and animals, its pretty dang good
October 12, 2019

Not sold on it. Some of the plants, it ID'd quickly, which was cool, but others it never did. A simple thing like a Cottonwood. While it thinks the phone battery goes down at an alarming rate. Also, there doesn't appear to be a way to enter something if you don't get a photo. A deer bounded away, I knew it was a mule deer, but because I didn't have time to snap a shot, it wasn't counted. It also crashed quite a few times. If I keep this app, it will just be for use as a plant field guide.
October 03, 2019

Slendid app for checking species! The camera focus is a little poor but it works well apart from that! Though I noticed that you only get a species picture to compare to after you've essentially confirmed it's that species. I'd like to be able to delete or edit observations incase they're incorrect first time :)
October 01, 2019

This app is a lot of fun. You can be the smartest grandpa and answer all the kid's questions with it. It helps knowing a little of how it compares what it sees to known images. It would really help if as the species is narrowed down it would give you helpful hints on what it needs to see to differentiate to the next level. For instance a tree, it's not going to get past dicots. But maybe it needs to see a perfect leaf and an acorn to decide between types of oak.
November 27, 2019

Not 100%... Camera won't focus either.
November 25, 2019

They have serious issues using the camera API, photos are blurry because the focus doesn't work. The rest of the app is awesome.
November 25, 2019

App worked fine initially, but now just closes when I point at a photo in my Gallery. Also when I use it to identify a photo, it will not allow the camera to focus.
November 16, 2019

Love this pretty spot-on would get 5 stars but the camera doesn't seem to want to focus
November 15, 2019

Not too bad an app, can identify most plants when pointed at, except not sure if it's correct or not. Camera also laggy and took a few secs to register after taking a shot.
November 09, 2019

Real life pokedex. You point it at living things and it tells you what they are. Works best for insects and plants. It has a hard time with mammals.
November 05, 2019

I spent the first two hours with it just wandering my neighborhood giggling to myself. What a wonderful, wonderful app. Thank you!!! I cant wait to get into the woods!
November 01, 2019

The idea is great, but there are problems with the in app camera. The minimum focus distance for seems to be about 1ft, any closer and the camera will not focus which is a huge problem when trying to identify something like an insect or other small organism as it's practically impossible. Tap to focus also does not help with this at all. The overall UI could also use some improvement as it feels a bit slow and buggy, even on a quite recent and powerful model smartphone (LG V40).
May 8, 2019

Amazing tool with minor fixable flaws 1. There should be an option to create a profile/attach it to an inaturalist account. 2. If I observe a species again, it should save that image with my other one for reference purposes. 3. It does not employ the zoom or focusing functions of my phone camera (Moto). 4. If I delete a picture from my phone, the app removes the image from my "Observed" folder, this is fine, however when I take another image of that same plant later on it still shows up blank.
May 8, 2019

pretty slow to load info on nearby species, might be caused by using full size pictures? I'd suggest thumbnail images for better load times, great app concept that i hope improves further!
May 7, 2019

generally works well. can't wait for it to feed in to inaturalist, that would make things much easier.
May 6, 2019

Can you optimize it for android 9.0
May 6, 2019

I love this app ❤❤❤❤
May 5, 2019

Truly amazing and useful app. I'm out identifying plants and other things in my yard and neighborhood I've seen for years but never looked up. But, there is room for improvement. The interface has a frustrating tendency to identify the species in the dynamic viewfinder only to lose that specific ID when I take the photo, even if I do so immediately and without moving the camera. Repeatedly. This and the high battery use are my main complaints. I expect to keep using it. Great when it behaves.
May 5, 2019

This is the best attempt at this kind of app that I've ever seen, particularly when recognizing the AI powering identification will only improve. Our family loves it despite technical difficulties. A few different features could absolutely improve our user experience: 1. Auto take picture once species is identified 2. Upload Photos (so we can zoom on our camera and not have to scare animals/bugs away) 3. Select photo focus 4. Backup data Thanks for inspiring our exploration!
May 30, 2019

love it, very useful
May 29, 2019

Brilliant app for identifying wild flowers etc, sometimes it can't find an item but most of the time it works well.
May 27, 2019

this app is awesome, its like having a Poke-dex but for real animals and plants! so much fun to use, and i finally get to know the names of the species in the area ive always seen, but never been able to identify.
May 26, 2019

it's good, and gets species about half the time, but it's a really big battery drain. this needs fixed as soon as possible.
May 25, 2019

Didn't identify the majority of plants. Google lens is much more accurate and can tell the difference between the Spanish bluebell and native bluebell unlike seek.
May 25, 2019

Great initiative! However accuracy is very bad, I have much better experience and more trust with PlantNet. But who knows how the models will be improved overtime...
May 24, 2019

when installing this app, be prepared for a lot of "we believe this is a member of dicots" and "we believe this is a member of animals" 3 stars because it atleast identified that a woodlouse was an isopod
May 24, 2019

takes a long times to identify species most of the time. camera software is slow, cannot zoom and doesn't autofocus properly. good idea for an app, just needs to be improved upon.
May 23, 2019

Incredible app. It's not great with non-local plants, garden stuff that doesn't grow naturally in the location. I assume that's because your geolocation is pretty important for the ID. I wish I could get some information about the plant's identifying attributes. What specific points can I use to visually identify this plant myself? Alternatively I could just carry a field guide. I want information about class/order/family/ genus on incomplete IDs.
May 21, 2019

This app seems very nice and we've tried to stump it on identifying stuff but it works amazingly.
May 20, 2019

Good idea for an app that gets you out and about searching for new species to photograph. Unfortunately, the camera in the app is pretty poor with no zoom setting, and it struggles to identify species from photos uploaded from the gallery, which can become frustrating. I think it needs more development to make it more user-friendly and accurate.
May 2, 2019

could name only my dog .. i tried with my plants at home.. none.. i tried with a rose.. couldn't identify
May 19, 2019

couldn't identify any plant other then bluebell! absolute rubbish. Said an allium, an astrantia, and a ranuculus was a didcot!! very poor. All were in flower as well. A pointless app.
May 17, 2019

cant seem to identify anything I ask.
May 16, 2019

useless. can never tell the species of plant. failed with dog breed as well.
May 15, 2019

It crashes when I take photos and i cant make the cameras focus. When it identifies the right plant with the full meter it becomes three dots and identifies as dicot right after taking the photo.
May 15, 2019

I would give it a 5 but you can't zoom in with the Camera and I dont think you can save your data
May 15, 2019

Needs lot of work. Cannot recognize many species. I hope developers are adding more and more species and recognition everyday and this is not end of it. If so within a year or so this will be a great app. Many people will use it for their knowledge and fun too if this app becomes a masterpiece.
May 13, 2019

would be a really cool app if it worked right. it will not record my observations AT ALL. super annoying.
May 12, 2019

Very quick and accurate but made my battery run down EXTREMELY quickly. This was after it had forced my phone to restart.
May 12, 2019

Pain to use. Failed on all the plants and I tried
May 12, 2019

I love this app, I really do! it has made me feel more inclined to nature. plus I've shown so many people this app and they love it! my ONLY complaint is that it doesnt use flash :( I really wish it did. Only because some shady areas in my garden (or where the bugs/fungus are) dont have enough light to recognize the photo. :(
May 11, 2019

gdd
May 11, 2019

☹😢😕
May 11, 2019

Rubbish app is the positive comment, complete and utter waste of space on my phone is another. Every plant that I have taken picture of is the same "dicot" that's roses, ragwort ; daisies and ferns. Going in the bin with all the other trash apps that are in google play store.
May 11, 2019

Very useful app, but I fail to understand how the offline part can correctly identify a species whereas the online, photo recognition, part then fails to find a match. In fact the photo recognition part can fail to recoggnise a photo that it correctly identified earlier.