When Orcas call, we’re listening
OrcaHello is an open-source AI-powered acoustic monitoring system that makes round-the-clock listening for Southern Resident Killer Whales practical for the first time in the Puget Sound.
How it works
The system continuously analyzes live audio streams from hydrophones on the Orcasound network, using AI to find the “needle in the haystack” – filtering hours of ocean sounds down to candidates for review (on average <10 min/day). Behind the scenes, marine mammal experts confirm whale presence, identify pod and call type when possible, and make go/no-go decisions about sending alerts. Only after this expert review are notifications sent to subscribers, ensuring alerts are both timely and reliable.
Real-world impact
When moderators confirm a whale visit, alerts go out to conservation partners who can take action: Washington State Ferries, the Port of Seattle, and the Quiet Sound program coordinate vessel slow-downs and pause pile-driving during whale presence.
In September 2025, OrcaHello captured the first recorded calls of a newborn J-pod calf at 1AM Pacific – before visual sightings the next day (Maple Ridge News). This moment highlighted how 24-hour acoustic monitoring can detect critical events that occur beyond the reach of daytime visual monitoring systems.
Since launching in September 2020, OrcaHello has picked up confirmed SRKW calls on 138 days, with detection increasing in winter months when Southern Residents are most active in the Puget Sound.
A growing dataset for research
During development, the team developed Pod.Cast, a web-based annotation platform that has generated approximately 15 hours of fine-grained annotated whale call data. This data was incorporated into a landmark bioacoustic dataset for orca research (Palmer et al. 2025, Nature), which has been used to evaluate foundation models like Google DeepMind’s Perch 2.0 (Burns et al, 2025).
OrcaHello expert moderations also continue to produce a unique “in-the-wild” dataset of 6,200+ minutes of curated hydrophone recordings – including 900+ minutes of confirmed orca calls alongside challenging anthropogenic sounds and other marine life (as of Jan 2026). You can take a listen to a curated list below.
Greatest Hits Recordings
Links to a curated selection of moderated OrcaHello recordings.
| Orcas (SRKW) | |
| Jpod newborn first calls | Picked up at 1AM on Sep 18 2025, before visual sightings the next day. Written about in Maple Ridge News |
| JKL pod Nov 2025 | Eventful ~1hr “bout” with calls, vessel noise, human and machine detections on the Orcasound web-app |
| Jpod-2020, Jpod-2021, Jpod-2025 | Mix of high quality pod-specific calls over the years |
| Marine life | |
| River Otter | Splashing & squeaks. One of the first false positives after deployment in Sep 2020. |
| Bigg’s transient killer whale | Not to be confused with SRKW, sounds similar to a layperson |
| Humpback whale | Beautiful calls, lots of reverb |
| Seagulls, Pigeon Guillemot | Bird calls are also occasionally audible at low tide |
| Anthropogenic sounds | |
| Vessel noise (low intensity) | Container ship & some undersea chains |
| Boat, Mechanical winch | Can be confused for biological sounds |
| Ship drive shaft | Repetitive squeak from a ship’s drive shaft |
| Port Townsend bell bouy | Clangs possible activated by intermittent ship wakes passing |
From hackathon to global open-source effort
OrcaHello began at the 2019 Microsoft Hackathon when volunteers – including project leads Prakruti Gogia, Akash Mahajan and Chris Hanke – reached out to Orcasound eager to apply their skills to conservation close to home. The team partnered with oceanographer Dr. Scott Veirs (co-founder, Orcasound) and killer whale biologist Dr. David Bain (chief scientist, Orca Conservancy).
Supported by an AI for Earth Innovation Grant, a team of engineers, designers, and program managers collaborated remotely through pandemic-era virtual hackathons to launch the first live system in September 2020. Today OrcaHello is part of the Orcasound open source project, with new contributors joining every year.
Links and resources
- Github – Orcasound (org), and OrcaHello
- Listen live to Orcasound hydrophones
- Follow along on Bluesky
Partners and support
- Orcasound — Cooperative hydrophone network providing live audio infrastructure and expert moderation (Dr. Scott Veirs)
- Orca Conservancy — Conservation partner and expert moderation (Dr. David Bain)
- AI for Earth Innovation Grant — Initial development funding (Microsoft, Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation)
- Quiet Sound & Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) — Grants for hydrophone network expansion
- Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database (WHOI) — Recordings used to bootstrap Pod.Cast effort