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Shipped 2026-08-26 · Bird A lot of bench work comes down to a judgment call about what you are looking at. Which bleaching stage is this coral at? Is this colony morphology type A or type B? Which of the four wear patterns does this component show? The answer is usually obvious with the reference images side by side, and much less obvious at 6pm with gloves on. A visual reference set is your own labeled answer key. You pick the categories, you pick the images that define each one, and Bird compares new images against that set.

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What’s new

  • Build a set in chat. Tell Bird what the categories are and which images define them. It drafts the set, shows you every label with its reference images, and waits for you to press Create set. Nothing is written until you do.
  • Comparative descriptions. Bower reads the whole set at once and writes down the cues that separate each category from the others, so the descriptions read as contrasts rather than captions. They stay at the level of what is visible.
  • Ask at the bench. Point Bird at something new and ask “which bleaching stage is this?” or “compare this against my wear pattern references”. In a live session it works hands-free, so you can keep both hands on the sample.
  • Your own written criteria. Give a category the distinction you would otherwise have to explain out loud every time, and Bird reads your wording from then on.

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The categories are yours

Bird never invents a taxonomy. It only reports which of the categories you defined a new image most resembles, and it will not answer with a category you did not define. There is no scientific identification and no diagnosis here: this is a comparison against your own examples. Match strength comes back as high, medium, or low, never as a percentage, because a percentage implies a precision this does not have. If the comparison is not clean, Bird says the match was inconclusive, names the categories it was torn between, and asks the question that would settle it. That is the intended behavior, not a failure. A confident wrong label costs far more than an honest question. Every match is an assistive suggestion for you to confirm. Bird will not tag the image, file it, or change your reference set off the back of its own answer.

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Why

Most reference sets exist because a protocol asks for a judgment it cannot make for you. A step that says “score the bleaching stage” is precise about the procedure and silent about the call, because the call is visual and the protocol is text. The judgment is the part that drifts: between people, between shifts, and between whoever wrote the protocol and whoever is running it at 6pm.

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Notes

A set holds two to eight categories with one to three reference images each. Two is the minimum because the descriptions are comparative, and there is nothing to compare against with one. Reference images must be JPEG, PNG or WebP. Bower accepts other image formats, including HEIC, but they cannot be used as references. Creating the set moves each reference image into the set’s collection. If you also want the set alongside a protocol, link the two with linked entities rather than re-filing the images, because moving a reference image out detaches it from the set. Bird compares one image per reply. Ask about the next one in your next message. Full detail in Visual reference sets.