Alato is a proud New Zealand-based bioacoustica company that focuses on monitoring technology. We are building both high quality bioacoustics hardware like the AR5 and software with Alato Lab our bat detection AI tool.

Alato works closely with DOC and DOC electronics since day one to produce the AR5. We went through many months of side by side testing to ensure the AR5 audio quality is as good or better than the AR5.

Alato are the main supplier of acoustic technology to DOC for monitoring across New Zealand.

We are committed to supporting conservation in New Zealand. We do this by offering discounted pricing to conservation groups, reseachers and charties who carry out this valuable work.

Commercial pricing is applied to organisations who are carrying out research or survey work in a paid capacity. If you are unsure which group you fall in to then contact us to discuss.

The AR5 is the first unit produced by Alato as we replace DOC's AR4 production. In speaking to customers we heard the same thing many times - "consistency is important". As such, the AR5 has some small design and production changes but ultimately provides a consistent user experience and data so that multi-year surveys can continue without interruption or inconsistent results.

We are dedicated to building the best hardware and software we can. Our goal is to continue to work closely with NZ ecologists to understand their challenges and build solutions for them. We are working on our new full spectrum acoustic monitor the SoundScout due for release in 2026. The SoundScout will be the next generation acoustic monitor with world class audio quality and modern connectivity and edge processing to change the access we have to acoustic monitoring data.

Alato has also build Alato Lab our bat detection AI tool. We hope to expand Alato Lab to detect bird species, insects, rats and possums.

Alaro provide servicing and repairs for AR4 acoustic monitors produced by DOC. Our firmware updates are made available for free to all AR4 users to download and upgrade to the newsest versions.

Alato have stock of the AR5 acoustic monitors year round. There are no long wait times to order or receive your monitors. If you are looking to purchase any monitors contact us to order or check out the AR5 here

The AR5 acoustic monitor is designed to record a wide range of wildlife sounds. It has both audio and ultrasonic microphones capable of recording bat calls from species like the Long-tailed bat and Short-tailed bat, audible bird calls such as the Kiwi, Tūī, and Morepork. It can also pick up frogs, insects, and mammal activity like the Possum. This makes the AR5 well suited for continuous, non-invasive biodiversity monitoring.

Alato Lab is software that automatically detects New Zealand Long-tailed and short-tailed bat calls from recordings produced by the AR4 or AR5 acoustic monitors.

AlatoLab’s bat classifier achieves strong real-world performance on independent, unseen data.

On a held-out test set of 21,219 recordings, the current model achieves 94.1% overall accuracy
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- 97.6% recall for long-tailed bats
- 88.8% recall for short-tailed bats
- 93.0% recall for non-bat sounds
- Macro-F1 score: 0.93

‍The macro-F1 score indicates the model performs consistently across all classes, rather than being biased toward the most common class.

To ensure these results reflect real-world use (not memorisation), the test data was carefully constructed using whole-site and whole-season holdouts. This means entire monitoring locations and survey periods were excluded from training and only used for testing.

The dataset includes recordings from DOC acoustic monitoring and independent field surveys across Aotearoa New Zealand, providing a broad and realistic representation of field conditions.

Yes Alato Lab is free for up to 5,000 files. This means you can try it out or use it for smaller projects free of charge. For larger projects check out our credit bundles.

Yes. ALato Lab automatically detects and tags bats in your recordings and gives you the option to reivew, audit and change them. It is designed to do the heavy lifting when reviewing thousands of recordings.

Alato Lab as all AI does sometimes make mistakes so you have the ability to correct or change these. We have built the UI to highlight the detections that are lower confidence and need human review.