Before particularly rough storms, I have been known to go outside and give my plants a pep talk. I'm not sure how I'd feel about receiving distress messages from my garden (“I need help!” from Bob the fig tree, etc.). But you can bet I’m going to sign up for this parasocial experiment, because today at CES, Bird Buddy announced Petal, a new AI-enabled camera to help you engage with the outside world.
Petal is a solar-powered camera that you can clamp onto a raised bed or planter, stick into a bed, or wrap around a tree limb. It will work anywhere as long as there’s wifi and sunlight. Like the bird-watching cameras that Bird Buddy is famous for, these cameras will give you extremely high-resolution, up-close video and photo of birds, bugs, and the plants they perch on. The cameras will then use an AI layer that can identify what’s going on outside, from a flower blooming to birds hatching or a tomato ready to be plucked.
As with most Bird Buddy cameras, you can do an awful lot without a subscription, but with a subscription, you can name individual birds, as well as the flowers, bugs, and plants in your yard. I can’t decide if this is charming or insane, but I’m 100% in for the ride this summer.
Bird Buddy hopes that you’ll buy Petal in multiples and place them around your yard. They’ll even have interchangeable lenses: You can go with a wide angle or change it to a macro for great depth of field. You can capture time lapse, and still get notified with your favorite artichoke plant gets visited by a bee or bug, or when it is affected by weather.
Though announced today, Petal will be officially introduced in a Kickstarter this summer with Bird Buddy’s other release, WonderBlocks, a modular planter system for outdoors that includes mason-bee hotels, bug hotels, and self-watering planters. Bird Buddy will also offer planting blocks impregnated with native plants and pollinators local to your geography. All these parts are meant to work together, and seem to imply that Bird Buddy is moving away from a singular focus on birds, and towards bird watching being part of your connection to the outside. Pricing has not been announced for either Petal or WonderBlocks.
