The haunting call of the kokako reminds Californian-based Kiwi entrepreneur Alexei Dunayev where he began in his quest to help computers understand the human voice.
Born in the Ukraine but raised and educated in Auckland, Dunayev has much to thank the endangered New Zealand bird - and Kiwi brainpower - for.
With technology developed by a University of Auckland researcher to decipher the song of the kokako in the New Zealand bush, Dunayev helped turn it into ground-breaking speech recognition software. He co-founded the online transcription service TranscribeMe, now used by tens of thousands of customers around the world in more than a dozen languages.
"Speech recognition is in an important phase," says Dunayev, TranscribeMe's CEO. "We're here to help computers recognise the human voice but there's still a lot of ground to cover before they can do so with precise accuracy. But we're getting closer every day."
Until that day comes, Dunayev continues to appreciate the value of the human ear.
TranscribeMe operates on a hybrid platform - combining the voice recognition software with over 300,000 human transcribers to achieve the perfect transcription. The crowd-sourced transcribers work from their homes across the world, receiving "micro-tasks" of between 10 seconds and a minute of audio to transcribe.
Four years after TranscribeMe began, it now has headquarters in Auckland, California, Belarus and Japan. Although Dunayev runs the business out of Berkeley, on San Francisco Bay, most of the research and development is still done in New Zealand.
"I consider myself a Kiwi and one of my passions is projects connecting New Zealand with the rest of the world," he says.
Dunayev maintains his connection with the University of Auckland, where he did most of his study (before winning a Fulbright Scholarship to Stanford to do an MBA in entrepreneurship).
He admits to having no idea where his career path would lead when he started at the university in 1999. He'd grown up in Taupo, where his father worked on Russian helicopters in the forestry industry, and had a passion for chemistry.
"But I was terrible at chemistry at university," he says. "Fortunately, I was accepted into one of the first conjoint degrees, in computer science and commerce. I tried out a whole bunch of things and kept my options open - really valuable in figuring out what I wanted to do in my career.
"The degree took four years but gave me an insight into the ability of technology to make people's lives and businesses better."
Dunayev then did an honours degree in information systems at the university's Business School and was a founding member of the Velocity entrepreneurial programme, which encourages university students to develop their own businesses.
"It's one of the things I'm most proud of in my life - having helped bring the culture of entrepreneurship into the university," he says. Dunayev started a fledgling software business, AXI Web Solutions, while at university and sold it in 2007.
The idea for a transcription service came to Dunayev out of need - he wanted to find a more efficient and accurate way to transcribe study notes for his architect wife, Alexandra.
"I thought it would make people a little happier and more satisfied putting a technology platform behind a transcription service. We were one of the first in the world to do that," Dunayev says.
At the same time, University of Auckland researcher Victor Obolonkin was developing software for his Master of Science degree - to detect and track the endangered kokako by their individual calls.
"It gave us the idea that, if the software could recognise birds, it may recognise speech in humans too," says Dunayev, who worked with Obolonkin to apply the technology to convert audio to text. Based in Auckland, Obolonkin continues to lead the technology at TranscribeMe.
Dunayev's entrepreneurial experience helped get the technology to market: "There's a lot of satisfaction in a scientist's breakthrough but there is a lot of hard work in the follow-up after that," he says.
That process began when Dunayev and his team won Auckland's StartUp Weekend competition in 2011. They developed their business plan, determining who would use a transcription service, before fine-tuning the technology. Starting out in The Icehouse business incubator, TranscribeMe secured $1.2 million in angel funding from private investors in New Zealand, the United States and Europe to support their rapid growth.
Dunayev is a firm believer in the power of mentoring and is on the board of non-profit organisation World Mentor, connecting young people to global business leaders.
"It's a fantastic piece of advice early in my career, that I'm happy to pass on: actively seek out advisors and mentors; people who can help you understand the opportunities out there on a professional level. It should be an ongoing conversation, where you don't live inside the university bubble, but have an element of feedback from the outside world."