Alex was an African Grey Parrot trained by animal psycologist Irene Pepperberg . Pepperberg bought Alex at a pet shop when he was about one year old. The name Alex is an acronym for Avian Language EXperiment.

Pepperberg said he could identify 50 different objects and recognize quantities up to six; that he could recognize seven colors and five shapes, and understand the concepts of "bigger", "smaller", "same", and "different", and that he was learning "over" and "under".Alex had a vocabulary of about 150 words. Alex died on September 6, 2007, at the age of 31.Alex's death came as a surprise; the average life span for African grey parrots is sixty years.