I had an interesting thought recently. We think that Ludvig is pretty clever. Well, astonishingly clever really. He does things like say good night at night time, ‘see you later’ when we go out, bark and then tell himself off, he knows we have yogurt after lunch and will start shouting out flavours to choose from as soon as he hears ‘what flavour would you like…’ he then goes on to make the noise that a pack of yogurt makes when snapped into individual pots, when he sees a cat he meows, he chats to Alexa…
Plus he also does things like mix up the phrases he knows and when he gets a response from us he repeats it. For example, he knows ‘don’t worry be happy’ and he knows ‘let me entertain you…’ and he will mix the two up and say ‘don’t worry let me entertain you’. Well, obviously he won’t know the meaning of what he says – however if he gets a reaction from us, he’ll then repeat it and add it to his repetoire, so in addition to the phrases we have taught him, he also has his own Ludvig phrases.
So we think he’s really clever, but of course, we could be biased 🙂
However, this is where the interesting thought comes in.
Let’s say that Ludvig is average – what would that mean for the above average African Greys? What can they do? I know there was one that recognized and said the names of hundreds of things, and Ludvig isn’t at that level. I’ve seen an African Grey operate a smart home system (which clearly isn’t that smart if a parrot can operate it) – however I am absolutely certain if we had a home system where we could speak to turn on lights or switch off appliances, Ludvig would be doing that with gusto! We have said we could never have doors which were voice operated as he would most definitely end up locking us out.
But it is quite a mind-boggling thought!!!
As a slight aside, one reason I never have any fears about devices ‘spying’ on us or listening in, as hearing Ludvig in full flow would most certain confuse anyone trying to learn anything from our household 🙂
