Merlin got me into birding, and I've found this to be true, at least in some regions, especially if there's lots of background noise.

Unless a species has a really, really unique call or song, I've made it my personal rule to get eyes on it and, if I'm still not convinced, to take a picture and cross reference with iNaturalist and what folks on there think of it.

I've learned to curse the species that differ from others by the sheen of the backs of the males' necks or the angle of a wingbar. Also, gulls that only differ by things like the color of their feet or beaks.

You can usually tell, though. Rare birds in the wrong place or time that come up only once are problematic, but if the bird is detected repeatedly there's a better chance. You should also be on the lookout for birds that mimic other birds (like the northern mockingbird and the gray catbird.)

Occasionally I'll see a screenshot of Merlin with, I dunno, a dozen different birds, and in the middle of the list: a catbird. I never have the heart to tell people that they just heard one very creative bird.

Cornell / Merlin / eBird publishes a global species frequency DB indexed by location and date (so, how likely is a species to appear in a place, on a day of the year)... In a project that I was working on, this helped a lot when used to influence the "raw" identification based on appearance alone.

For info, there's a FOSS bird-call app, available on F-Droid, that's pretty decent: WhoBird

I've not seen this personally, but maybe it's region specific.