Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

The AI that listens to chickens? 🐔💬

1 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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0:55

In this brief multi‑speaker discussion, the participants explore a novel approach to monitoring chickens using AI‑powered cameras. They describe how visual and audio data captured by the cameras can reveal birds' health status, such as disease detection, and even interpret vocalizations as a form of language indicating hunger, illness, or other conditions. The conversation highlights a recent shift from traditional sensor‑based systems to a camera‑only solution, emphasizing the simplicity and comprehensiveness of the new method. The dialogue concludes with a question about how much of the underlying technology and data is proprietary, raising considerations around intellectual property.

So you're measuring what the birds are saying to each other? Yeah, of course. Birds can talk. They can show their hunger, their expressions, and their problems.
And they talk to each other and they say, George over here is sick. But that's kind of what you're finding out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the birds have language. Wow, that's really fun.
Yeah. It sounds like you're using cameras and maybe mic to pick up both audio as well as visual cues of the bird's health. Yeah, yeah. And then do you put some of the sensors and it'll continuously monitor the—
Right now we are detecting the disease by using the AI cameras, right?
Just cameras?
Yeah, cameras. Just cameras. So we were using the sensors before, but recently we have replaced all the sensors, and now just through the cameras we are getting all the data. How much of that is your IP?