AbstractAutomated audio recording offers a powerful tool for acoustic monitoring schemes of bird, bat, frog and other vocal organisms, but the lack of automated species identification methods has made it difficult to fully utilise such data. We developed Animal Sound Identifier (ASI), a MATLAB software that performs probabilistic classification of species occurrences from field recordings. Unlike most previous approaches, ASI locates training data directly from the field recordings and thus avoids the need of pre‐defined reference libraries. We apply ASI to a case study on Amazonian birds, in which we classify the vocalisations of 14 species in 194 504 one‐minute audio segments using in total two weeks of expert time to construct, parameterise, and validate the classification models. We compare the classification performance of ASI (with training templates extracted automatically from field data) to that of monitoR (with training templates extracted manually from the Xeno‐Canto database), the results showing ASI to have substantially higher recall and precision rates.