Can you feel empathy for a robot? The electric parrot project is about designing a robot that can engender empathy. For this we are constructing a novel zoomorphic robot that can create its own life story: that is to say it can experience the world, be changed by the experience, and communicate the experience to us. We aim to show through psychometric tests that giving the robot an implicit life story will invoke empathy. Such a robot can subsequently be used for empathy intervention.