Smart Parrot Uses Amazon Alexa To Turn Lights On And Off: Watch

ORLANDO, FL — Congo African grey parrots are freaky smart, but Petra, a bird in Florida is tech savvy as well. Petra uses Amazon’s Alexa to to turn lights on and off and ask about current weather conditions, and it just never stops, the bird's owner says.

Petra was already a star on YouTube, where she chats up a storm in exchange for peanuts, but her mastery of Alexa has delighted internet users. The 4-year-old parrot started talking earlier than most in her species and already knows 300 words.

Petra is also learning how to control Google Home devices, and she’s using her own smarts to prompt conversations between artificial intelligence devices.

“Now she has them talking to each other,” Petra’s owner, who hasn’t been identified, told television station WOFL.

“I know what the weather report is all day long,” the woman said. “She’ll say what’s the weather?”

Petra also can’t seem to decide whether she wants the lights on or off, or perhaps she is delighting in the cause and effect. Some research suggests that African greys have reasoning skills equivalent to a 3-year-old.

“All day, every day, it’s all lights on, all lights off,” Petra’s owner told television station WKMG.

“First, you’re half awake and, like, ‘Was that a dream? Did that just happen?’ ” the woman said.

Petra’s YouTube channel has close to 13,000 subscribers, a number that is sure to swell with her fame. It says she’s potty trained and does her business on command in a trash can. “Good girl,” her owner says. When anyone leaves the room, Petra bids a fond farewell: “I love you, bye-bye.”

Still young, Petra looks to be on the road to parrot superstardom.

African grey parrots’ cognitive abilities have been tested in a growing body of research. The most famous was Alex, a Congo African grey parrot like Petra, that was involved in a long-running cognitive research trial with scientist Irene Pepperberg from 1977 until his death in 2007.

Pepperberg, a research assistant and lecturer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discovered through her research with Alex and other African greys that they’re not only capable of amassing large vocabularies, but communicating with humans in meaningful two-way conversations. Alex didn't just use the words he had been taught, but also spontaneously picked up on others he heard. Alex also was innovative, sometimes combining simple words in a way that suggested to scientists that the parrot’s language comprehension went beyond mimicry.

Stories about the language capabilities of African grey parrots abound, including one about Nigel, a parrot with a proper British accent that was speaking Spanish when he was returned to his California home after a four-year absence.

In Michigan, a foul-mouthed, tell-all parrot didn’t have to testify in a 2017 murder trial. “Don't (expletive) shoot me,” the foul-mouthed parrot reportedly squawked on a video recorded by the murdered man’s survivors weeks after the shooting. Prosecutors worried at the time how they would swear in Bud, the parrot, to tell what he apparently heard and if such testimony would be admissible.

There are several distinct species of African grey parrots, which are native to equatorial Africa, and the Congo African grey is the largest of them. Their plumage is light gray, and they have a solid, black beak. The second most common species is the Timneh African grey, which is slightly smaller and has darker feathers. Both are equally intelligent, and it has been said they have the mental and emotional capabilities of a 5-year-old human child.

File photo via Shutterstock / Vera Zinkova