If you’ve ever had to endure an automated phone line, you may have wished you could just speak to a real person. New research from the University of Glasgow suggests that parrots feel the same way.

The recent study, led by animal-computer interaction specialists at UoG, appears to reveal pet parrots’ preferences for video calling their friends over watching pre-recorded footage of the same birds.

Glasgow Times:

Dr Hirskyj-Douglas, from the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, is the paper’s lead author.

She said: “Our previous research had shown that parrots seem to benefit from the opportunity to video-call each other which could help reduce the mental and physical toll that living in domestic situations can take on them.

“In the wild, they live in flocks and socialise with each other constantly. As pets, they’re often kept on their own, which can cause them to develop negative behaviours like excessive pacing or feather-plucking.

“In this study, we wanted to see if we could identify differences in behaviour when parrots were given agency over what they could see on their devices. Would they notice when the pre-recorded parrot on the screen didn’t respond the same way a live one did? And if so, what could that tell us about designing future systems to fit their needs?”

To conduct the research, parrots and their owners were given tablet devices to explore the potential for video chats to remedy the loneliness that the intelligent creatures - highly sociable in the wild - can often suffer in captivity.

Displayed on the tablets were large bright buttons showing pictures of the other parrots in the study. The birds’ caregivers trained them to initiate Facebook Messenger calls by ringing a bell when they wanted to interact with the screen.

After a ‘meet-and-greet’ session where the birds were introduced to each other over video chat, they were then given free reign to pick up the phone over the course of 12 sessions. They could make a maximum of two calls in each session, for a maximum length of three hours.

Six of the sessions put the parrots in touch with another live bird, while the other six connected them to a pre-recorded video of their digital pal. After each session, their caregivers recorded the birds’ reactions to the interactions.

Although engagement varied between individual parrots, the study showed that the birds seemed to prefer live calls to pre-recorded sessions, spending an average of 266 seconds engaging with other birds compared to 166 seconds with videos. In total, the birds spent 561 minutes on live calls and 142 minutes watching playback of video content.

The birds initiated 65 calls out of a possible 108 in the live phase, but just 40 in the pre-recorded sessions. They reached their two-per-session limit in 46% of the live calls, but chose to make two calls in the pre-recorded sections only 25% of the time.

The birds’ caregivers reported that they seemed more engaged in the live calls, often moving closer to the screen to see the other bird and mirroring each others’ behaviour. In contrast, the caregivers reported their birds seemed less interested in pre-recorded calls, with some birds quickly flying away from the screen or refusing to start calls altogether.

Glasgow Times:

The research is the latest development in a collaboration between researchers at the University of Glasgow and Northeastern University in the USA, and it is hoped that the findings could help the emergence of the ‘animal internet’, where digital technology is used to allow animals to interact with humans and each other in new ways.

Dr Hirskyj-Douglas added: “Working closely with caregivers to design the study has given us new insight into how these intelligent birds react to the complex stimulus digital tablets can provide.

“The appearance of ‘liveness’ really did seem to make a difference to the parrots’ engagement with their screens. Their behaviour while interacting with another live bird often reflected behaviours they would engage in with other parrots in real life, which wasn’t the case in the pre-recorded sessions.

“Some caregivers believed that their parrots were capable of differentiating between the sessions. One told us that their bird enjoyed vocalising with another live bird but quickly lost interest when there was no response to their calls during pre-recorded videos.”

“This was a small study, and we can’t draw any definite conclusions at this stage about whether the parrots were in some way aware of the differences between live and pre-recorded interactions. However, the results are compelling, and suggest that further study is definitely warranted.

“The internet holds a great deal of potential for giving animals agency to interact with each other in new ways, but the systems we build to help them do that need to be designed around their specific needs and physical and mental abilities. Studies like this could help to lay the foundations of a truly animal-centred internet.”

Dr Rébecca Kleinberger of Northeastern University and Jennifer Cunha of Northeastern University and Parrot Kindergarten contributed to the study and co-authored the paper.

The paper, titled Call of the Wild Web: Parrot Engagement in Live vs. Pre-recorded Video Calls, will be presented at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.