Photo by Jenifer Taylor O'Connor
Parrot-Human Communication and Interface Design
Started in 2024, the project is a collaboration with Jennifer Taylor-O'Connor of Parrot Kindergarten and Prof Corinne Renguette of Purdue University, and with Jennifer's Cockatoos Ellie and Isabelle.
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Overview
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Parrots have shown to be able to interact with tablet-based speech boards to engage in intentional and functional parrot-human communication. However, the influence of speech boards’ interface design on avian sense-making, usability and user experience is yet to be explored. With Parrot Kindergarten and Purdue University, we are studying parrots' speech boards interactions to better understand the role of speech boards in parrots' intentional and functional communication and the influence of interface design variables. Our aim is to inform interface design choices that maximise avian usability and experience, and optimally support functional parrot-human communication to increase avian users' agency, enhance their wellbeing and advance our understanding of parrot cognition.
Functional communication
This is a tablet-based application featuring menus and sub-menus of items such as pictures and drawings, representing objects and ideas that might be relevant for the birds, including food, games, places and even affective states. She has leveraged associative learning rules to teach the birds the meaning of the different representations so they could use them to communicate with her in their daily life.
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The research has so far examined whether the interactions of a Goffin's cockatoo with her speech board correspond to established functions of communication identified by Jakobson's linguistic model and whether there is correspondence with biological functions in animal communication. The parrot's selection mostly had a conative function, being primarily requests for cognitive or environmental enrichment, secondarily requests for social interactions and finally requests for resources such as food and beverages. A smaller proportion of selections had emotive function, including expressions of affective states such as contentment or discontent. An even smaller proportion of selections had pathic function, akin to chit-chat. Finally, very few selections had referential function, including observations on aspects of the environment. These findings make sense, considering that Ellie's caregiver is her proxy for interacting with relevant aspects of her environment (hence the conative utterances) and also a key social component of her interspecies flock (hence the emotive and pathic utterances).
Additionally, to explored the bird's intentionality we examine her persistence in making requests via speech board selections when these are not fulfilled, her ability to seek out displaced representations of preferred foods, and her response to unexpected outcomes. Findings suggest that the cockatoo's interactions with the speech board align with established linguistic and biological communication functions and indicate intentional communication on her part. This has implications for studying parrot cognition and, thus, for designing speech board interfaces that might better support parrots’ communication abilities.
Video by Jenifer Taylor O'Connor
Emerging questions
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This work opens many interesting questions:
-What are the parrots’ sensemaking mechanisms at play here? Is it just associative learning and the resulting conventions, or do they recognize iconic representations as such and, if so, what level of fidelity is required?
-What interface design, including items’ representational, arrangement and categorization choices, would best support parrots' functional communication? What design criteria are relevant for the birds?
-How could existing limitations of the medium be addressed to enable the birds’ easy and error-free interaction?
-If we could answer all these questions, could this kind of tool become a reliable mean for birds to self-report?
We are currently investigating these questions and the birds’ active participation in this research is of course central.
More information about the Parrot Kindergarten community and work can be found on the Parrot Kindergarten website.​
More about the work that Jennifer does with her birds can be found in the Parrot Kindergarten documentary film.
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Further readings
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​Renguette, C. C., Cunha, J. M., Mancini, C. (2025, forthcoming). New pathways for human-animal communication, enrichment, and wellbeing: Improving interspecies connections. In Beaver, A. & Mancini, C. Computing Technology, Animal Welfare and Human-Animal Relations (Animal Welfare Series). Springer.
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Cunha, Jennifer; Renguette, Corinne; Stella, Lily and Mancini, Clara (2024). Communication Functions in Speech Board Use by a Goffin's Cockatoo: Implications for Research and Design.In: ACI 2024: The International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction, 2-5 Dec 2024, Glasgow, UK.
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Cunha, Jennifer and Mancini, Clara (2024). The Day After: Ethical Considerations for the End of Enriching Animal Research Projects. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction, ACI '24, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 1–8.