“Duolingo at this point is really all in on AI,” Klinton Bicknell, Duolingo’s head of AI, told me in an interview this month.
The company said it’s been invested in AI features since its launch in 2012, but advances in generative AI have propelled its latest efforts. Those advances helped create the features Explain My Answer and Roleplay, and the AI-powered feature Video Call, which launched on iOS in September.
Video Call is a GPT-4 powered feature that lets you video call with one of Duolingo’s characters named Lily. You and Lily then have a conversation in the language you’re learning. Duolingo said Thursday the feature is now available on Android devices, and it can be used to converse in more languages, like German, Italian and Portuguese, on all devices and Japanese and Korean on iOS.
The company also said that Lily is now more expressive in these calls, you can also access call transcripts to help you look back at your call and Lily will call you by surprise as opposed to you always calling her. But like Explain My Answer and Roleplay, Video Call is available only on Duolingo Max, which costs $30 a month or $168 a year.
Artificial intelligence has made a lot of news in the last few years as it has seeped into more products, to varying degrees of success. While many people aren’t interested in AI features in products like smartphones, the AI in mobile apps global market is expected to be worth $250 billion by 2033, according to the market and research group Market. And similar to other companies like Adobe, Duolingo is doubling down on the technology.
Video Call is focused on conversing in whatever language you’re learning while other lessons on Duolingo revolve around reading and comprehension in your desired language. While reading and listening comprehension are beneficial to learning a second language, a study published in Psychological Science suggests that producing a language (writing or speaking it) may be a more effective way to learn than just practicing comprehension.
“Producing language is an incredibly strong learning experience (when the production involves generating the language yourself and you are provided with feedback),” the study’s authors wrote.
Bicknell said Duolingo experimented with a feature where you would converse with another person in the language you were learning, but the company didn’t pursue that feature.
“When you’re having a conversation [in another language] with humans, most adults feel kind of embarrassed,” Bicknell said. “If you’re talking to an AI, they’re not judging you … so you can be free to just try things.”
I used the feature a few times and I still felt silly at first despite knowing I was talking with an AI. Lily has a robotic sounding voice similar to Siri or Alexa, so talking with her felt impersonal. We also talked about my language learning experience the first few calls, which felt awkward.
After the first couple calls, Lily started asking me about books I’m reading and pets. I also asked Lily questions like you would in any conversation, like if she has any pets. Lily said she has an old dog named Harold who she said sleeps most of the day.
Our conversations weren’t too long — about a minute in length — and they weren’t too complicated. It was a lot of Lily asking me questions about myself and me responding and asking her a few questions. Lily would then say something like, “I have to go,” and we’d say goodbye and the calls ended.
With each call, it felt easier to talk to Lily, and I felt more comfortable with the conversations. The calls also helped break out of the rote memorization of some lessons, and forced me to really think about what to say next and how to say it. This feature makes me wonder if Duolingo will ever revisit the idea of calls with another person for advanced learners in the future. For now, Video Calls with Lily feels like a helpful tool in learning a new language.
And some leaders at Duolingo said Video Call is the kind of teaching tool the company has dreamed of.
“It provides the kind of learning opportunity that was previously only available to those who can afford to travel or hire a tutor,” Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, said in a news release.
While Video Call might help you in your language learning journey, some people might still be cautious about using the tool because of privacy concerns over AI. More than a third of people told CNET in a survey that privacy was a key concern for them when it comes to AI.
Duolingo said it’s not taking and using people’s sensitive information and using it to train its AI model, but it is using people’s data to tailor lessons and Video Calls to each person’s needs.
“We’re really just using people’s data to figure out what works, what doesn’t work,” Bicknell said. “Trying to figure out when people might have a call that doesn’t go as well as we would like it to, what led to that and then using that to try to fix it to make it even better for future versions.”
The company did say the app will ask a random set of people for permission to keep audio recordings of their Video Calls. Bicknell said there are additional restrictions on who can access these recordings.
Duolingo also said there are protections in place to protect people from inappropriate content.
The company said each Video Call has a goal, and each person can get to the goal any number of ways. However, if a person goes too far astray, Lily, the cartoon avatar, will try to steer the conversation back. If the person keeps trying to take the conversation to inappropriate places, Lily will end the call.
Some AI can also hallucinate and give wrong information sometimes, but Duolingo said it isn’t concerned with hallucinations in Video Call.
“This feature is not about giving you information,” Bicknell said. “It’s just Lily having a conversation with you.”
Unfortunately, if you do run into an issue with Video Call, Duolingo said, there isn’t a way to report an issue within the feature. Other Duolingo AI features, like Explain My Answer, do have ways to report issues so this feels like an odd exclusion.
Despite this, Duolingo said the overall reaction to Video Call has been positive, and the company hopes the feature will encourage people to continue learning. The goal is to “simulate natural dialogue and give people this personalized, interactive practice environment,” Bicknell said. “People have said things like, ‘This is what Duolingo was missing.'”
For more on Duolingo, here’s how well the free version of the app prepared me for a trip to Italy and our review of the language learning app. You can also check out our best language learning apps.
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