Design and evaluation of a parrot-to-parrot video-calling system (2023)

I have a male Barraband (Superb) parrot [1] and he can scroll videos on Youtube, select the ones with birds in and play those. People are in disbelief when the bird starts watching bird videos on his tablet. His &quot;screen time&quot; is not every day and limited to a few hours. I would love for him to be able to call other birds, he is smart enough to be able to pull that off right now.<p>I have noticed some new behaviours recently:<p>1. If I&#x27;m eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating.<p>2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.<p>3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and I think he tries to talk back.<p>Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Superb_parrot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Superb_parrot</a>

Slightly off topic but somewhat related I&#x27;ve heard of a person (Richard Campbell, can be heard on the podcasts &quot;Dot Net Rocks&quot; or &quot;Run as radio&quot;) who taught his parrot to use his voice to control the light at it&#x27;s cage. The surprising result was that it became obvious that it wanted to go to bed earlier than they thought. It turned off the lights much earlier than the timer had before it gained control and would shut it off again directly if a human turned in on again.

You be good. I love you.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nautil.us&#x2F;the-great-silence-237510&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nautil.us&#x2F;the-great-silence-237510&#x2F;</a><p>Corvids, parrots are extremely intelligent. How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.<p>If you can do grab a copy of Alex and Me.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;3018307-alex-me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;3018307-alex-me</a>

Crows are pretty smart, I befriended one after offering it cashews daily as I would sit in my patio working on my laptop. Now he pecks on my keyboard to generate code with AI to resolve simple Jira tickets.

&gt; others would want to show another bird their toys<p>Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn’t care for them.<p>They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong &quot;destructive&quot; urges too &#x2F; they want to take everything apart and so on.

Maybe they can take over twitter.com, now that it’s unused.

Feels like they need to develop a parrot-friendly input device and a little automation to complete the call.

It wouldn&#x27;t be hard to set up a service like this experiment so birds can socialize whenever they wanted.<p>&gt; They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird<p>And I really hate to bring AI into it, but &quot;bird chat bot&quot; doesn&#x27;t seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.

I was on a zoom call with a colleague and we were both WFH. His dog started barking, which made my dog start barking as well.<p>Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other, but they seemed to enjoy it.

TZ: &quot;How many types of eye cones do birds like parrots have, what are their colors?&quot; CGPT: &quot;...birds do have an RGB system that&#x27;s roughly analogous to ours...&quot;<p>So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones and wouldn&#x27;t see very well on the screen.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07bc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07...</a>

Fwiw, this[1] turned up when teasing AIs with &quot;what is the latest news in visual sentiment analysis for parrots?&quot;.<p>[1] <i>Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update</i> 2022 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC9877086&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC9877086&#x2F;</a>

Previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35664219">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35664219</a> (215 comments); <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38493299">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38493299</a> (16 comments)

Very cool! But was the video client open source?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kottke.org&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;richard-stallmans-rider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kottke.org&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;richard-stallmans-rider</a>

I wonder whether they used a mirror or simple recordings as baseline

The story is neat, but the level of ads on that page is toxic... when overlays started popping up partway through the video I had to leave.

Social networks for birds:<p>Bird Roulette<p>BeakBook<p>CagedIn<p>Instasquawk<p>And ……….. Twitter

Video did not strike me as convincing.

Finally - a good use for technology!

This made my day, thanks!

It proves that keeping animals in cages hurts them badly.

I worry the next step will be to create a social media site for parrots and then they will be just as lonely and angry as we humans.