Parrots who video call their 'friends' become less lonely, study finds

• Domesticated parrots who video call each other are less likely to be lonely, a new study found. 
• Experts helped owners train their pets to signal when they wanted to use tablets or smartphones.
• When contacting other birds, the parrots exhibited increasingly social behavior, scientists said. 

Parrots that can talk to their "friends" over video chat feel less lonely and have an improved quality of life, scientists say. 

In a new study published in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System, domesticated parrots were trained to signal to make video calls to other birds.