This AI feature in Duolingo can give your language lessons a boost

“Duolingo at this point is completely focused on AI,” Clinton Bicknell, head of AI at Duolingo, told me in an interview this month.

The company said it has invested in AI features since its launch in 2012, but advances in generative AI have driven its recent efforts. These developments helped create features Explain my answer and role playAnd the feature is powered by artificial intelligence Video callwhich launched on iOS in September.

Video Call is a GPT-4 powered feature that allows you to make a video call with a Duolingo character named Lily. You and Lily then have a conversation in the language you’re learning. Duolingo said Thursday that the feature is now available on Android devices, and can be used to speak more languages, such as 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, and you can also access call transcripts to help you review your call and Lily will call you out of the blue instead of always calling her. But like explaining my answer and role playing, the video call is only available on Duolingo Maxwhich costs $30 per month or $168 per year.

AI has made a lot of news in the past few years, seeping into more products, with varying degrees of success. While many People are not interested in the features of artificial intelligence In products like smartphones, the global mobile app market is expected to be worth $250 billion by 2033, according to the market and research group. market. Similar to other companies such as AdobeDuolingo doubles down on the technology.

The video call focuses on speaking whatever language you’re learning while other lessons in Duolingo revolve around reading and comprehension in the language you want. While reading and listening comprehension are beneficial for learning a second language, a study published in Psychological sciences It is suggested that producing language (writing or speaking it) may be a more effective way of learning than simply practicing comprehension.

“Language production is an incredibly powerful learning experience (when the production involves creating the language yourself and being provided with feedback).” The study’s authors wrote.

Bicknell said Duolingo experimented with a feature where you could talk to another person in the language you were learning, but the company did not follow through with that feature.

“When you have a conversation[in another language]with humans, most adults feel a sense of awkwardness,” Bicknell said. “If you talk to the AI, it doesn’t judge you…so you can be free to try things.”

I’ve used this feature a few times and it still felt silly at first even though I was talking to the AI. Lily has a robotic voice that sounds like Siri or Alexa, so talking to her feels impersonal. We also talked about my experience learning the language on the first few calls, which felt awkward.

After the first couple of calls, Lily started asking me about books I was reading and about pets. I also asked Lily questions like she would in any conversation, like if she had any pets. Lily said she had an old dog named Harold, who she said slept most of the day.

Our conversations weren’t very long – about a minute – and weren’t very complicated. Lily has been asking me a lot of questions about myself and I’ve been responding and asking her some. Then Lily would say something like, “I gotta go,” and we’d say goodbye and the calls would end.

With each call, talking to Lily became easier, and she felt more comfortable during conversations. The calls also helped me break out of the routine memorization of some lessons, and forced me to really think about what I was going to say next and how to say it. This feature makes me wonder if Duolingo will revisit the idea of ​​making calls to another person for advanced learners in the future. Right now, video calls with Lily seem like a useful tool in learning a new language.

Some leaders at Duolingo said Video Call is the kind of teaching tool the company dreamed of.

“It provides the kind of learning opportunities that were previously only available to those who could travel or hire a tutor,” Louis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, said in a press release.

Although a video call may help you on your language learning journey, some people may still be wary about using the tool due to privacy concerns about artificial intelligence. More than a third of people said CNET in the poll That privacy was a major concern for them when it came to artificial intelligence.

Duolingo said it doesn’t take people’s sensitive information and use it to train its AI model, but it does use people’s data to personalize lessons and video calls to fit each person’s needs.

“We’re really just using people’s data to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” Bicknell said. “Trying to figure out when people might have a call that doesn’t go the way we want it to, what caused that and then use that to try to fix it to make it better for future releases.”

The company said the app will ask a random group 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 safeguards in place to protect people from inappropriate content.

The company said that every video call has a goal, and each person can reach the goal in any number of ways. However, if someone strays too far, Lily, the cartoon avatar, will try to guide the conversation again. If the person continues to try to take the conversation to inappropriate places, Lily will hang up.

Some AI systems can also hallucinate and sometimes give false information, but Duolingo said it’s not concerned with hallucinations in a video call.

“This feature is not about giving you information,” Bicknell said. “It’s just Lily having a conversation with you.”

Unfortunately, if you encounter a problem with a video call, Duolingo said, there’s no way to report a problem within the feature. Other Duolingo AI features, like Explain My Answer, have ways to report issues, so this seems 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 keep learning. The goal is to “mimic natural dialogue and give people that personal, interactive training environment,” Bicknell said. “People have said things like: ‘This is what Duolingo was missing.’

To learn more about Duolingo, here’s how good it is The free version of the app prepared me for a trip to Italy And we have Language learning app review. You can also check our website Best language learning apps.