Heket

Hear what’s calling when you’re not listening.

Heket is a locally adaptive acoustic monitoring system for frogs and toads. It listens continuously, preserves interesting calls, identifies likely species, and lets you review what it heard.

Heket doesn’t just run a fixed model. You can correct what it gets wrong and retrain it using recordings from your own site. A new installation can start with community-contributed clips from TurtlePond.us and gradually replace that borrowed knowledge with local examples.

Local first. Learn locally. Share deliberately.

Heket?

Named for the ancient Egyptian goddess, often depicted with the body of a frog.

What it does

Heket connects to an always-on RTSP audio source and watches for frog and toad activity around the clock.

-Detects and classifies likely calls -Preserves the original audio for review -Works with noisy, real-world environments -Learns from labels and corrections you make -Builds models adapted to your site -Can bootstrap from TurtlePond.us community clip packs -Can contribute selected clips back to the community -Can share selected observations with iNaturalist

How it works

Listen → Detect → Preserve → Review → Learn → Share

Heket listens continuously but keeps humans in the loop. When something interesting happens, the original recording remains available so you can decide whether Heket got it right.

Corrections become training material. As local recordings accumulate, Heket can retrain and become increasingly specialized for the species, microphone, background noise, and acoustic environment at that particular site.

Start with the community. Become local.

A new Heket doesn’t ship with a universal frog model.

Instead, you can select community clip packs from TurtlePond.us for frogs, toads, and common background sounds relevant to your site. Heket uses those recordings to build its first model.

As you label recordings from your own environment, local examples progressively replace community examples. The community provides the starting knowledge; your Heket learns your site.

Clip packs can also be added later. If geese, insects, machinery, or another unexpected sound starts confusing Heket, a relevant community pack can give it a new starting point.

Your Heket. Your recordings.

Heket is local-first. Its core monitoring, recordings, labels, and models live with the installation.

Connecting to TurtlePond.us adds community clip packs, contribution, and external integrations, but the cloud doesn’t become your Heket. You decide what leaves your installation.

Keep your observations local, contribute selected training clips to TurtlePond.us, publish selected observations to iNaturalist—or do none of those things.