Rainforests are disappearing faster than scientists can monitor them. Forest Listeners is a Google Arts & Culture and Google DeepMind experiment that turns that problem into an invitation: anyone, anywhere, can now help. Built on over 1.2 million audio recordings from the Atlantic and Amazon rainforests, the experience asks people to listen to sounds from the forest and identify animal calls. Every response helps fine-tune Google's Perch AI model to automatically recognize species, making biodiversity monitoring faster and more scalable than ever before.
My UX challenge was to make that feel meaningful rather than mechanical. The real design work was finding the balance between storytelling and science: drawing people in with the wonder of the rainforest, then guiding them naturally into becoming active contributors to real conservation research.
Category:
Artificial Intelligence
Client:
Google Arts & Culture x WildMon
Mapping the Journey from Story to Science
The core design challenge on Forest Listeners was finding the right balance between emotional storytelling and functional data collection. I mapped out the high-level user journey early in the process to make sure every step felt intentional, guiding people naturally from curiosity and wonder into active contribution to real scientific research.
Bringing the Idea to Life, Fast
Rather than waiting for production audio, I used AI-generated VO to create a functional prototype of the experience at an early stage. This gave the team and stakeholders something tangible to react to, and helped shape the final direction of the product long before the build began.
