“Duolingo at this point is really all AI,” Clinton Bicknell, Duolingo’s head of AI, told me in an interview this month.
The company said it has been investing in AI features since its inception in 2012, but advances in generative AI have fueled its latest efforts. These advances helped create the Explain My Answer and Roleplay features, and the AI-powered Video Call feature, which launched on iOS in September.
Video Call is a GPT-4 enabled feature that allows you to video call one of Duolingo’s characters named Lily. Then you and Lily have a conversation in the language you are learning. Duolingo said Thursday that the feature is now available on Android devices and can be used to chat in 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, you can also use call transcripts to help you look back on your call, and Lily will call you out of the blue compared to when you always call . But like Explain My Answer and role-play, Video Call is only available in Duolingo Max, which costs $30 per month or $168 per year.
Artificial intelligence has made a lot of news in recent years as it has infiltrated more products, with varying degrees of success. While many people are not interested in AI features in products like smartphones, the global market for AI in mobile applications is expected to be $250 billion by 2033, according to market and research group Market. And like other companies like Adobe, Duolingo is doubling down on technology.
Video Call focuses on conversation in whatever language you’re learning, while other Duolingo lessons revolve around reading and comprehension in your desired language. While reading and listening comprehension are useful for 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. rather than merely practicing understanding.
“Language production is an extremely powerful learning experience (when the production involves creating the language itself and you are given feedback),” the study authors write.
Bicknell said Duolingo experimented with a feature where you’d chat with another person in the language you’re learning, but the company didn’t pursue that feature.
“When you’re having a conversation [in another language] with humans, most adults feel somewhat embarrassed,” Bicknell said. “If you’re talking to an AI, they’re not judging you … so you can be free to try things.”
I used the feature a few times and still felt stupid at first, despite knowing I was talking to an AI. Lily has a robotic-sounding voice similar to Siri or Alexa, so talking to her felt impersonal. We also talked about my experience learning the language on the first phone calls, which felt awkward.
After the first couple of phone calls, Lily started asking me about the books I’m reading and about my pets. I also asked Lily questions like you do in every 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 — and they weren’t too complicated. There was a lot of Lily asking me questions about myself and me answering and asking her some questions. Then Lily would say something like, “I have to go,” and we’d say goodbye and the calls would end.
With each call, I felt easier to talk to Lily and more comfortable with the conversations. The calls also helped me break out of 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 one-on-one calls for advanced learners in the future. At the moment, Video calls with Lily looks like a useful tool for learning a new language.
And some executives at Duolingo said Video Call is the kind of learning tool the company has been dreaming of.
“It offers the kind of learning opportunity that was previously only available to those who could afford to travel or hire a tutor,” said Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, in a press release.
While Video Call can help you on your language learning journey, some people may still be wary of using the tool due to privacy concerns over AI. More than a third of people told CNET in a survey that privacy was a top concern for them when it comes to AI.
Duolingo said it is not collecting and using people’s sensitive information and not using it to train its AI model, but 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,” Bicknell said. “Trying to understand when people might have a call that doesn’t go as well as we’d like, what led to that, and then using that to fix it to make it even better for versions of next.”
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 records.
Duolingo also said it has safeguards to protect people from inappropriate content.
The company said that every video call has a purpose and each person can achieve the purpose in any way. However, if a person strays too far, Lily, the cartoon avatar, will try to bring the conversation back. If the person keeps trying to take the conversation to inappropriate places, Lily will end the call.
Some AIs can also hallucinate and give wrong information at times, but Duolingo said it’s not about hallucinations in Video Call.
“This feature is not about providing information,” Bicknell said. “It’s just Lily talking to you.”
Unfortunately, if you run into a problem with Video Call, Duolingo said, there’s no way to report a problem within the feature. Duolingo’s other AI features, like Explain My Answer, have ways to report problems, so this seems like an odd exception.
Despite this, Duolingo said the overall response to Video Call has been positive, and the company hopes the feature will encourage people to keep learning. The goal is to “simulate natural dialogue and give people this personalized, interactive hands-on 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.
Check this out: The coolest mobile gadgets we saw at CES
