Ask Birdi Agent is an AI assistant built into Birdi. Ask it a question or give it a task in plain language, and it works alongside you — answering from your real map data, taking safe actions, driving the map, and pointing you to the right help article. It's currently in beta and available on all Birdi plans.
Ask Birdi Agent can help you:
Get answers about your maps, layers, measurements, volumes and plan usage
Describe what it can see in a map, a selected area or an uploaded photo
Take everyday actions like creating, renaming or organising maps
Set up the map view for you — split comparison, timeline, basemap, layer focus and more
Generate PDF reports of your imagery or measurements
Walk you through how to do something, with a link to the full guide
When to use Ask Birdi Agent
Reach for Ask Birdi Agent when you want to:
Get a quick answer without digging through menus — "how many maps do I have?", "what's the area of my site boundary?"
Understand what's in your imagery — "describe what you see in this area"
Do a task hands-free — "create a new map", "rename this map to site progress"
Set up a view — "compare my two most recent surveys", "show the annotation table"
Produce a deliverable — "generate an annotation report for this map"
Learn how something works — "how do I share a map?" — and get the steps plus a help link
Get moving when you're not sure where to start — describe your goal ("monitor my site's progress over time") and it will map out the Birdi workflow and offer to take the first step
What you can ask
Ask Birdi Agent understands plain, everyday language — you don't need exact feature names. Here are the kinds of things it handles well.
Get answers from your data
"How many maps do I have?"
"What's the total area of my annotations on this map?"
"How much processing do I have left this month?"
"Is my report ready yet?"
Describe what you see
"Describe what's in this map."
"What can you see in this part of the site?"
"Take a look at this photo and tell me what's going on."
Take an action
"Create a new map called site progress."
"Duplicate this map."
"Move this map into the Mining folder."
"Set this map's location to Newcastle, NSW."
Drive the map
"Switch to 3D."
"Compare my two most recent maps side by side."
"Show the timeline."
"Focus the orthophoto and hide everything else."
Create a report
"Generate an annotation report for this map."
"Make a media report of my drone imagery."
Learn how to do something
"How do I detect objects on my map?"
"How do I invite someone to my organisation?"
Step-by-step: using Ask Birdi Agent
1. Open Ask Birdi Agent
Select the AI button in the toolbar or the tag on the right of the screen to open the assistant. It's available on both your dashboard and inside a map.
On the dashboard, you'll see a prompt inviting you to ask anything or pick a suggestion below, along with popular starting points like Create a new map, Process my drone data, Measure a volume and Generate a report.
2. Ask a question or pick a suggestion
Type your question or task in plain language, or select one of the suggested prompts to get started. Inside a map you'll see map-specific suggestions such as Create a map, Process a map Detect objects in this map and Generate an annotation report.
Tip: Ask Birdi Agent can see which map and page you're on, so you can say "this map" and it knows what you mean.
3. Ask it to describe what it sees
Ask Birdi Agent can look at your imagery and describe it — a whole map, a specific area, or an uploaded photo. Just ask in plain language, for example "describe what you see in this area".
Use this for a quick, qualitative read of a site. For anything that needs to be precise — counting objects, measuring areas or calculating volumes — it will point you to AI Detect, which is built for that.
Tip: Ask Birdi Agent will always flag that a visual description isn't a definitive or qualified assessment, and may ask for your input to confirm. Treat it as a helpful second pair of eyes, not the final word.
4. Follow the reply and quick-reply buttons
Replies are short and to the point, and usually end with a clear next step. Where there's a choice to make, you'll get quick-reply buttons — just select one to keep going rather than typing it out.
5. Confirm anything that draws or runs
You stay in control of anything that changes your data or costs processing. When you ask it to measure, detect or process:
For measurements and detections, Ask Birdi Agent arms the tool and you draw the area on the map yourself.
For processing, uploads and AI Detect, it opens the window pre-filled — you review the settings and confirm before anything runs.
6. Let background jobs run
Reports, processing and detections run in the background. Ask Birdi Agent will tell you when something's running so you can keep working — it lets you know the moment it's ready.
Tip: You can safely close the panel, or even the map, while a job runs. Your results come back automatically.
7. Manage your chats
Select New chat to start fresh when you switch to a different task or map.
Your recent chats are saved so you can pick up where you left off.
Use the stop button to halt a response, or the X to close the panel.
What Ask Birdi Agent won't do
Ask Birdi Agent is built to be safe. It will never do the following on your behalf:
Delete maps, layers or annotations
Invite, remove or email people
Create share links
Make billing or plan changes, or spend money
For actions like inviting a user or sharing a map, it gives you the steps and a link to the guide instead of doing it for you. And while it can describe what it sees in your imagery, it won't treat that as a qualified or definitive assessment — for accurate counts, measurements and object outlines it points you to AI Detect and asks you to confirm.
Best practice tips
Be specific about the outcome. "Generate an annotation report for the Volumetric layer" works better than "make a report".
Open a map first for map-specific tasks, or just ask Ask Birdi Agent to open one for you.
Use a visual description as a starting point, not the source of truth. For counts, measurements or volumes, back it up with AI Detect.
Use the quick-reply buttons — they're the fastest way to move to the next step.
Check the scope before you commit. For reports and measurements, it'll confirm what's included (all annotations, or a specific folder) before generating.
Start a new chat when you change tasks so answers stay in the right context.
Follow the help links it shares when you want the full walkthrough of a feature.