Building the Pronunciation Layer of AI (projectsapiens.xyz)
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Gateway Plaza Revitalizes and Future Proofs (indyweek.com)
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Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
425 Improvement 296 5/26/2025, 6:14:09 PM htxt.co.za ↗
The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this article from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.
This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing learning a long while ago.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435
But it's just so horrible now, constant gamification, attempts to pull me in with streaks and freezes and notifications and "did you know you can have us nag you even more"-breaks between the lessons I'm actually there for. It's gotten to the point where I'm just done because I've already paid for the service and i just want to be left alone to do the exercises, but they never let me get from one exercise to the next without having to go through at least two or three of those annoying "gamification and engagement" attempts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783
14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had!
I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of restraint.
Team A ships feature X and sets their KPI to some arbitrary measure of engagement. They miss, obviously, but instead of regrouping and hitting the drawing board, A doubles down and pressures Team B to point towards X in feature Y. A sees some marginal level of gain in engagement for X, obviously, so the intervention is deemed a success. 6mos later, Team A is asked to return the favor and add a modal pointing to new feature Z, per the request of Team B.
I don’t really know what the solution is except outside of careful org-wide watchdogging to ensure this sort of user-hostile engagement infighting gets nipped in the bud.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher
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That makes me think about how everyone defining an operational alert/warning thinks theirs is very important, leading to so many that users time them all out and everyone loses.
I ended up disabling notifications completely (and eventually just deleting it)
It still spams you after every lesson, but I often just kill the app when it does. Quite a few ads also fail to load due to Lockdown mode or my pihole (also when away from home, due to the vpn I always keep).
I may just be their worst customer, having never given them a cent or even clicked an ad (and often not even impressions). On the other hand a bunch of people use it because of me and follow me due to having a long streak, so maybe I'm still worth keeping around.
Thanks for reminding me it had page translations, I did a few of those and enjoyed it! Shame it went.
There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app.
In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations don't appear to be good.
> if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app
Learning a language to fluency requires real commitment, and I’d say an app could never possibly do it on its own. One of the most key things Duolingo gave me was consistency and a lack of an excuse to constantly practice and learn. But you also have to (and I did) use the language daily, watch content in the target language, travel and speak with locals in the language, etc. I’m not sure where Duolingo ever claimed that it alone was enough to actually reach proficiency or fluency.
Duolingo’s gamification and streaks and leaderboards gave me a reason to put a lot of effort into learning the language, and I don’t know where I’d be without it. There’s a lot of things about Duolingo I don’t love but I’m incredibly grateful that it exists.
That's changed gradually over the last few years as they switched from using gamification in pursuit of learning to using a veneer of learning as a pitch to get people to try their game.
On top of this, some people say motivation is cheap, discipline is what matters.
Discipline is well and good, and if you're willing to put in the effort to become better disciplined to push through difficult things, I agree that you're probably better off. I do not agree that someone who already has that level of discipline would be hurt by a gamified system, though. The rewards of gamification on their own are fairly minimal, as they merely provide a (possibly false) sense of progress independent of their own assessment of how they are doing.
https://www.alfiekohn.org/topics/motivation-inside/
Instead of sticking with language learning because you have some intrinsic reason to want to learn it (or even a external one such as wanting a new job) you're substituting that with whatever Duolingo puts for their gamification. To the degree you engage with and are motivated by the gamification you are substituting your own metrics of success and progress for points and streaks.
And soon enough we end up here, where Duolingo has gamified their internal numbers and in doing so gamified your "learning".
Kids having fun playing hide and seek? Wrestling and throwing stones? They are learning hunting/survival skills.
Today with more abstract knowledge needed it is harder, but the concept of making abstract learning a game again, is a very smart one in general. It of course fails, if engagement becomes the metric and not gaining knowledge.
The streaks and points and everything else is a gamification of gamification of learning.
I personally find the gamification of Duolingo over the top but I can’t argue it works with people it works with. My 11yo loves it and is top of their class in Spanish from bottom as a result. They’ve taught themselves a decent amount of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean along the way. I know they couldn’t have done it through sheer willpower and authenticity no matter what Kant would think of them - they’re 11 for gods sake. What parent wouldn’t be thrilled their child is becoming fluent in a language and picking up two others? Does it bother me they care about being in diamond league or not? Not in the least. If they were up selling or cross selling maybe. And I use this as a chance to talk about how insidious gamification could be if it were - or if it were in service of sucking their attention for profit ala social media and advertising.
That said, again: I get it this turns off many people. I suspect they’re totally aware of that. But for many people I’m 100% certain it helps keep their engagement over time in the skill they’re hoping to learn even if it somehow makes their success impure in the eyes of others. But for learning a language the success is in the language skill, not the process by which you acquired it.
But consent is key. Maybe we need regulation that compels companies to disclose these manipulative techniques in digital services. Give people the chance to opt in or out.
If we're just talking about tracking and making visible streaks, vocab words learned, tenses mastered, etc. that seems fine; little different than in fitness training where one tracks workouts, miles run, pace improved, weights lifted, etc.. Adding in a few goals and milestones met can be helpful
OTOH, if we're talking about skewing the content to maximize psychological manipulation at the cost of actual learning, that is toxic gamification, and certainly against the user's goals.
Haven't used DuoLingo, so I'm not sure which one we have here?
By now my friends who use Duolingo all know it’s a game, not a real learning experience. I think they got lucky and filled a void in the market for things people think they want (learning a new language) while avoiding the parts they dislike (the effort of learning).
It got recommended by default for years when people asked for an easy way to learn a language, but they leaned hard into the path of gamification instead of trying to improve the learning experience for those who wanted to learn.
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When Duolingo added that viral post on Growth hacking, it caused quite a stir about the push-notifications and gamification tactics they use. Ultimately, we decided it wasn't worth it for Coursera to veer into edu-tainment.
However, it is interesting to watch how much gamification works in adding and retaining users. In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap was 5x of Coursera. Now at similar revenue it is 20x of Coursera.
As a user, I think Duolingo is over-gamified (stopped using it) but Coursera is severely on the other spectrum where it comes off as too bland/boring to keep up the motivation. I am sure there's a happy medium to be found between reminding users to engage in something hard while doing right by learners.
Maybe this is because Coursera requires a lot more effort? My pessimistic view is that most people do not like learning, let alone learning in their leisure time with their own bucks. On the other hand, Duolingo gives more people the false impression that it's easy to learn a new language. And check out their math and chess program. They are really really easy, like pre-school level easy. Naturally, more people would be using Duolingo.
Sadly, I have come to the same conclusion.
I have been training and giving seminars for ages. I don’t think that I’m the world’s best teacher, but I’m not that bad.
Geeks can be fun to teach, because they actually enjoy learning. It’s really a fundamental requirement for our industry.
Non-geeks; not so much. I often try to teach non-geeks how to do some small thing (usually around using tech). They almost always basically tell me that they don’t want to learn. Instead, they want me to do it for them.
There are definitely geeks that have leveraged this, to become fairly wealthy, but I find it kind of depressing.
To be a bit cynical about it: the typical DuoLingo player has probably been misled to some extent about its effectiveness, yes, but also many of them don't particularly want to learn a new language. I suspect that they're happy to be able to play a popular mobile game that everyone else is also playing without the stigma of being a "Candy Crush addict" and "timewaster". "I'm learning a language!" is the welcome figleaf. https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=243
Unfortunately as they got popular automated translation services got good enough that nobody was going to pay for a slightly better and slower translation enmass.
Once that happened, that's when it seemed like they dumped their goals of teaching language and instead focused on dark pattern money extraction.
It drives me nuts that Duolingo's Japanese course does not explain grammar nor does it introduce new grammars fast enough. It's super boring to see です and ます most of the time, with occasional new grammar points thrown in. It's also strange that Duolingo introduces honorifics without context. This is super confusing. Who in the world would decipher a long string of characters out of a few really bland sentences?
I've just accepted for some time, to her chagrin, that she's effectively playing a game that just so happens to be language themed.
People always assume the alternative to Duolingo is that everyone will start a habit of reading BBC Mundo in Spanish or something, and it's obviously not true for many if not most people. And that's fine, some people are only going to scoot by with a dilettante level of interest until they take a real plunge.
Still, 3 minutes per day is just about my tempo. I don't care about literally anything in there except the learning part and consistently doing only one lesson per day makes them very nice and polite most of the time - I feel like I'm in the 'beg-these-for-money' instead of 'milk-them-dry' cohort. (Or maybe I'm in the permanent 'lets-be-nice-for-them' long running experiment?)
Previously I'd spend far more time in Duolingo trying to learn and hadn't really learnt any useful language skills at all. I can see it being helpful for drilling some vocab if you were learning elsewhere, but it just doesn't work to actually learn a language.
Thankfully this won't happen with LLMs, as compute is too expensive so execs can't just take an easy way out of optimizing for number of questions asked
Similar to how you role play being an emperor in Civ: you learn a thing or two but it's no where near what the real thing is.
That's fine as a game!
These two tactics per se are alright, right? If anything, I'd appreciate that Duolingo tries to keep me engaged. Besides, the more one spends time on learning language, the faster they learn.
The issue with Duolingo is not about gamification, but that translation is ineffective and boring, no matter how much gamification there is. Personally I find that the most effective way to learn a new language is starting with Comprehensible Input and then moving on with tons of output. Take Spanish for example, Easy Spanish, Dreaming in Spanish, Español Sí!, Extra, and Destinos offers lots of fun input for beginners. Paco Ardit's graded readers are great too.
Another problem with Duolingo is that it does not help listening comprehension at all. It turns out that we can only pick up sounds in context with tons of repetitions and combinations in consecutive sentences - a feature that is exactly what Duolingo misses. Yes, it has introduced listening and stories, but the amount of them is too little to be useful. Another lesson is that reading does not help improving listening much. When we read, we see individual words and phrases easily, while it's really hard to pick up individual words when listening. I didn't understand the difference and spent a lot more time reading than listening. As a result, my reading was at the level C1 yet I could only understand slow Spanish at the level of A2.
I found the same thing with one of the meditation apps. I was just maintaining the streak, but not getting anything from it, after about a year. I can't imagine doing that for 6 years, so hats off to your wife.
Schools can give reward signals for demonstrating subject mastery, or for tuition payment and attendance. It seems like Duolingo gamified the latter instead of the former.
Things like education or healthcare shouldnt be privatized, since that always eventually ends up as profit-first game. The product suffers since milking is obvious, and quality of service is at best secondary concern.
Is is really that hard to see all this?
This was the impression I got from the app the first time I tried it, which had to be some time before 10 years ago (not that I'd suggest nobody gets any value from it, I assume mileage varies). It just seemed to reduce an inherently arduous and deliberate effort into something that was primarily easy and gratifying. There's a very lucrative market in convincing people they've learnt rather than entertained, whether it's through easily digestible YouTube videos (a trap I've fallen into) or apps that intensely use gamification elements.
There's a difference between the concept of delivering better methods of learning or easier access to good information, and delivery mechanisms that try to make it as fun as scrolling Instagram, in my mind anyway. Coursera actually has some really solid learning paths, and free university lectures are invaluable, but even those aren't effective if you don't deliberately allocate significant time and mental energy into grinding through the stuff you don't understand, and this seems just as true for languages.
So it just always seems like a false promise to me, at least beyond the premise of making it more approachable at the outset, and I guess it doesn't surprise me that things seem to be further going in a lame direction.
For apps, I use Clozemaster and Babbel. Unfortunately Babbel is starting to feel like it's also chasing gamification, but it does have sensible content.
For podcasts and YouTube content, I follow EasyGerman and Coffee Break German, and both are part of larger brands for other languages:
https://www.easy-languages.org/our-languages
https://coffeebreakacademy.com/
For kids… what about kids books in the target language?
"Why settle for 3 years when you can milk people for a lifetime? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something," it doesn't but they'll likely use that meme, "and you plan to spread that learning over 72 years, they must not spend more than 22 minutes a day actually learning anything! The rest of the day should be adverts and retention."
I can hardly remember any of the Esperanto, I never even mastered the Arabic alphabet let alone basic phrases, and actually living in Germany rapidly revealed how mediocre it had been at teaching me German.
I stopped at a 2500 day streak, shortly after one of the big controversial UI changes.
Recently discovered brilliant.org, do you have an opinion about them?
The timing of when I finally quit Twitter was when they shut down third-party clients, but that was after I was already half checked out because it had been in decline for a few years already (predating the change in ownership.)
A friend of mine said the exact same thing. And then a YouTube creator I follow recently made a video where he said the exact same thing too about cancelling Duolingo because he had become more addicted to maintaining the streak than learning.
Gamification of the streak itself means its wholly unnecessary for the app to facilitate learning to produce engagement.
Duolingo is the junk food of language learning. Always has been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsDbgGQmIM
(As an aside I hate that videos are now "source material" for a discussion... it feels somewhat lame).
> wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.
I think this is a great bit of insight into what a lot of what the web has become! If they had been more manipulative and stepped up the quality and utility of the product would that have been acceptable to remain competitive vs something like tiktok?
I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo.
Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference.
When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that.
IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)
I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.
For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start.
I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that when I learned other things later on, instead of being actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what it actually meant.
It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was able to bridge the meaning between words and was actually understanding and following entire conversations.
My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I probably should take some courses for that though. But I am at least fluent which is great.
You're level may be basic and not super fluent, but if you can make yourself understood you can have a conversation. But if your listening comprehension is not good enough and the person is not slowing down (or if it's multiple native speakers speaking at a natural cadence) then you're lost.
For beginners to German these days, I heartily recommend the free “Nicos Weg” course from DW that goes up to B1 at least. Also has, unusually for language classes, a cast of likeable characters played by reasonably good actors carrying a consistent, building storyline throughout the lessons.
These still exist but they're hidden in a little unlabelled button at the top right of the unit overview and I don't think they ever mentioned it to me or do any hinting to go look at them. It's silly cause they're quite useful. I guess they just want people doing the lessons (playing the game) and not boring them with asking them to read about grammar.
... only for me to get to Germany and realise very early on that I would need to do a basic A1 language course.
The app was gibberish; the pronunciations were wrong, the genders were misleading, and the daily interactions they tried to drill in me were far from useful.
The overinflated proficiency instilled in me by the app, made me genuinely believe I could interact easily with a German - a delusion I was quickly and painfully made aware of, much to my chagrin.
But a book on theory can be mass produced and sold to everyone who wants to learn a language. Can't bottle and mass produce an actual experience of using the language for years. So theory it is.
For German, knowing grammatical cases {Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive} has been helpful as an on-ramp to using the language repeatedly correctly.
It is reasonable to expect to be a litle bit more then A2. Fluency is not.
Interestingly, this is indirectly mentioned in the Linkedin post: "I've always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop)"
"Mobile-first" anything has always been a race to the bottom for everything: attention spans, information density and nuance, target demographic. Not just with Duolingo , but also with:
- Investing (Robinhood leaning into meme stocks and "gamification")
- Gaming (Angry Birds going from $3 lifetime purchase to a pay-to-win, micro-transaction hellscape)
- And of course, the first casualty, human communication (280 characters instead of an essay or open letter.
Some techniques I use is not looking at the words when they're being read out to practice my listening (though sometimes the TTS voices make things unnecessarily difficult to understand), and I also try not to look at the word bank before trying to translate a sentence in my head first.
My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out from cold storage would makes sure you've actually got them locked into your memory.
Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're forced to type everything.
Seedlang seems cool though, I'm gonna give it a download later.
> My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out of nowhere would makes sure you've actually got them locked into your memory
Seedlang does this too. There's a gigantic library of all the exercises and you can go through them and put them in your review lists. Each time you review an exercise, you rate the exercise as 'hard' or 'easy', and depening on the rating, that exercise will then show up more or less often in the future. Eventually if the interval gets to be a year long, it'll give you the option to retire an exercise.
Each time you do a lesson, it'll list all the exercises from that lesson and you can choose which ones you want added to your review queue. It's really nice. Lots of control over your own spaced-reptition needs.
> Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're forced to type everything.
Yeah definitely. Seedlang also does this btw!
This exists, but not for free users.
Just ask your favorite LLM to teach you <language>.
This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2]
“It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3]
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...
[2] https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college students who can't read books)
[3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)
Heck, Latin even has a Latin-only method: LLPSI. "Roma in Italia est", you'll figure it out quickly enough.
The typical outcome was a person who spent a lot of effort and still was unable to do anything useful with the language after years (reading real book, watching movie, chatting).
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dual+language+book
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comic+book
odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
The same thing that has worked for me as a method for learning languages has always been the same. Get books, particularly short stories or children's stories aimed at A2/B1 level, and read them. Practice grammar. Get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down. Boring but effective. And of course practice listening and talking, which means either having native friends, doing a course, using audio materials from somewhere, etc. Courses with actual humans make learning go faster (in the case of Romansh, it would have been impossible without the course).
I don't find duolingo to be effective at all, as others mention beyond the A1/A2 level. I'd be a bit more skeptical and say even A2 you need to expand your horizons.
It's just that most Europeans' native language is not English or some other language spoken by hundreds of millions or billions of people. So they have to learn at least one foreign language to function in the modern world. And many European countries require children to learn two of them. Some require passing language exams as part of the high school graduation.
I studied English and French in school. My native tongue is spoken by about 15 million people in the world, the official language of my native country (which I also speak fluently) is spoken by about 20. One gets a lot of motivation from knowing that, by learning English, one will be able to speak to billions.
I think, based on my own experience, it is harder to to from English to another language for a variety of factors. Many native speakers will jump on the opportunity to practice with you, understandably. Everyone has different motivations and some will ask why are you even bothering if you speak English. Since there's almost always an English source for what you want, you have to avoid laziness as much as you can. Lastly a great majority of entertainment is in English - things like french rap are basically a crime against humanity.
That doesn't mean that every European you meet is automatically multilingual or automatically has English in one of their languages. Go to rural France and you will find plenty of monolingual french people. Italy is also somewhere English is not as widely spoken as you might think given the tourism (in fact outside major tourist areas, good luck). Go to the mountains in Switzerland and you might find people who speak a couple of national languages but no English.
You can however go "the other way" and for major languages there is an abundance of materials. I agree 100% with the sibling comment that there is something about the act of writing things out that helps with memorisation. I've done this with a few languages and I don't think flashcard apps are enough. Can they help? I guess a little. Are they going to make you fluent? Not a chance. Absolutely nothing beats taking a course and being dedicated to it, in my experience.
More generally I think what I am saying is that there is no magic shortcut, except being born to parents speaking multiple languages at you.
I looked up the definition as:
> authoritarian rule, often involving the fusion of state and corporate tech power, where technology is seen as the driving force of the regime and used to consolidate control, suppress dissent, and erode public trust.
I’m trying to connect the dots between the above and Duolingo.
It's not like it's a local school helping out students.
Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
This is classic PR spin. Do one thing, publicly say you’re not doing it. Try to get the benefit of good intentions while doing the opposite.
The CEO doesn’t lose any battles with the product managers. He could reverse the changes in a matter of days by calling a meeting or sending an email.
What’s actually happening here is they Product Managers are responding to what gets rewarded at the company, which ultimately comes from the CEO.
If you read the article you’ll see how the CEO wrote a memo about how productivity expectations will rise and started cutting contractors in favor of AI.
To suggest that this CEO was afraid of reducing morale by asking employees to put fewer pop-ups in the app is completely backward.
I don’t understand why you’re so intent on defending this particular CEO as trying to maintain morale when we’re quite literally in a comment section for an article where the CEO made a drastic anti-employee move that everyone could have seen was a morale destroyer.
It’s also hard to imagine a situation where the people making the app really, really want to pollute it with pop-ups and other junk, and they have to band together to resist the CEO’s efforts to make a good app, and then on top of all that the CEO rolls over and lets them do it despite wishing they wouldn’t.
The simplest explanation is that the employees are building the app and setting direction as mandated by executives. The app we see is the result of what executives are rewarding and asking for.
[edit: thinking about it more, I think I have built up a lot of goodwill with the app over the years, and it's a strange mental process for years of goodwill to evaporate over the course of a few weeks]
If the CEO truly wants this he should resign because he is at best a completely ineffectual leader. The reality is he wants more money so he wants to pack as much engagement bait into the app as possible to juice numbers as please investors
The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track of where your strengths and weaknesses are.
Actually, in some ways better. HelloTalk has a "correct the other person's sentence" feature that shows an inline diff, yet it's simple enough for people who have never heard the term diff.
When I was working as language teacher, I was tasked specifically with teaching speaking. I would often use information gap activities. These are activities where two or more parties have pieces of information but need to obtain pieces from others in order to complete the task. Sometimes, these would us language forms (re: sentence structures), but most of the time they were free flow activities. It didn't matter how "correct" the language was so long as the idea was communicated.
To think about it another, how often do we make mistakes when speaking? Writing? And yet, we still managed to communicate just fine.
That's not to say there shouldn't be any focus on form, but simply that it's not nearly as important as many tend to think when it comes to language learning.
No offense, I can tell you're neither a linguist nor a language teacher.
This is one are where the human input is invaluable and irreplaceable. Because language (the complex kind) is inherently human. It quite literally is.
However the stock did rise about 25% after his comment so maybe it was at least working for the short term if some investor wanted to cash out?
If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better) are helping screw over poor people. Just slightly.
I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.
Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner.
If more people did it, and it became a movement, like buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only slightly.
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it can be an absolutely incredible tutor.
I started using it when i was already at a pretty high level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been excellent from the very beginning. It translates, gives varied examples, explains syntax, compares verb tenses and conjugation and more.
Those are all things books will give and people as well and often better.
Can it be a tutor? Sure, if you squint. But "tutoring" you on some question you have is not the same as "learning a language".
After 4 weeks I also learned Spanish enough to maintain casual conversations just from trying to talk to someone online who did not speak English. I am rusty now, however, because I do not speak it with anyone, nor do I see or hear Spanish anywhere. Spanish is way easier, IMO, in comparison to Polish.
Thoughts?
On what? If I understand you correctly you learned through people and practice and community.
It worked for me, and I found it to be the best way to learn a new language.
I tried Duolingo but I got nowhere useful that way.
My take is that basically anything can be made to work if you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a secondary concern.
I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.
That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually learn to speak the language, find HelloTalk to be best, beaten by nothing other than actually sitting down with a native speaker.
you cannot build a moat with LLMs, so there is no value in using any service that is wrapper around the chatpgt
For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when the human forums closed. I often found as much value in the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.
Because when you write it yourself, you can share it with others. Those others can then build on what you did or use it themselves.
Not everything needs to be a transaction - some people just want to make the world slightly better without asking for anything in return.
If you hate ads, deception, and dark patterns as much as I do, then most software has a negative value. But I'll only pay for it if the value exceeds the price. That means there's a rather large (and probably growing) share of the software market that I'll just never pay even a penny for, because in my opinion, it has negative value. But it's not because I don't want to spend the money. It's because I want those companies that are peddling ad-laden bloatware to be a financial failure so that the market will intervene and offer better alternatives.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. How else do you let your potential market know you have a product that they would benefit from? It's not always deception to get into their wallets, sometimes it's a genuine fair value trade.
Though I do think modern practices are full of immoral patterns, especially what George Lucas pioneered of brainwashing children into buying things. So yeah I agree that in practice, most modern marketing is just plain deception.
On the other hand, you then have millions of young, talented developers wasting their time and energy on open source projects that are hugely innovative and useful, but because they wholesale reject marketing, their projects never get anywhere, and they settle for unfulfilling jobs that society could do without.
And maybe the saddest part of all is that many such young talented devs spent so much time making useful projects for free, and never saw a dime because of it, despite the fact that corporations are now profiting from their work daily. You may say, well, the dev put it out there for free and didn't ask for money, but in the current market, what other choice is there? The race to the bottom has already been won and first place was $0.
Let me introduce you to the ancient lore of BrandonM, in his epic treatise "rsync v Dropbox": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Software freedom has never been about money, and always been about preserving public access to a software commons. You might believe your local bookstore is a better source of knowledge than your local library, but that's only because you don't really know what you're missing.
Duolingo being crap and costing anything/month is the problem.
(Paid Duolingo user and long time GNU/Linux user here)
My dad likes doing oil changes himself which I'd never do, but it doesn't occur to me to insult and question why a person has different values than I do.
Which, at the point I was welding together solar panel mounts onto shipping containers was true. But maybe i could have asked myself ‘should I’ instead of ‘can I’ somewhere earlier in the process hah.
Anyway, Im responding to you because i find ChatGPT to be a FANTASTIC tutor. Like I was absolutely blown away. It can do all the translation stuff, but also answer questions about different verb tenses, conjugations, syntax etc... I'm sure that an extremely good spanish teacher would be better, but I think ChatGPT is probably better than most. And it is free.
You don't even need to know any grammatical terms (I barely do for English, and suspect most people don't either for their native language), so long as you can speak a language. Like, I don't have a clue what past participle or present perfect tense mean in either language. Nor do I particularly need to know them.
Though, I'll admit that it would surely be easier to learn Spanish if I knew and understood the equivalent constructs in English. Case in point - when I was a kid and they taught us French in school, it was just an exercise in memorization rather than understanding, because they hadn't taught us the English versions. Apparently that's just what happened where I'm from for an extended period of time. Yet, I'm very significantly literate.
Still, you just ask chatgpt "how do I say _ in Spanish?" and then ask questions with variations for subject, object, tense, etc. You obviously would start easy "how do I say 'I eat bread'", but can progress to 'I ate/will eat/am going to eat/had eaten/would have eaten/could eat bread'
And you could eventually make it quite complicated eg "if you had told me xyz as you should have, I would have asked him about it. Now I am hoping that etc..." There's a huge mix of grammatical concepts in that (and I know very few of their names), and chatgpt would easily translate it and explain the concepts to whatever degree I desire.
If I was sufficiently motivated, I am quite sure that chatgpt could rapidly and effectively teach me all English and Spanish grammar.
Perhaps it would be a different story if learning something wildly different - eg Vietnamese. Yet, there's surely still similar constructs underlying it, since they all have to reflect the same world.
When I am learning something new in development, the LLM is immensely useful since it has unlimited patience, and I can zero it in on exactly the level of complexity or understanding that I need.
Like that would be like the Chipotle CEO proudly announcing that they’re firing their workers because they’re getting all of their ingredients from Taco Bell now due to “Taco Bell’s system being so much easier to operate” and “Taco Bell is so cheap and they have so many locations”
It would be quite surprising for there to be some other company with capacity to supply thousands of restaurants with exactly what you need.
I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.
Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
And as others in these comments note, if one wants to use an LLM as a language tutor, you can do that for less than what Duolingo is charging while also getting the benefit of being able to tune it to your exact needs instead of being stuck with whatever Duolingo decided is best.
Part of my PhD thesis[1] was to study how robots (voice agents) can influence human language. The key component is a social connection. Back in 2017 I did that in the lab. But the research is pretty clear about it.
Also my own experience (trying to learn Arabic) is, that I only remember words/phrases which I picked up during social gathering (camping in the dessert).
The "perfect" learning app would work like how children learn: by interacting with their social surroundings. No need to learn the vocabulary or the alphabet at the beginning. The hard part is, to create a social interaction between the learner and the AI that evolves over time.
[1] https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/7da0e989-aa9f-4b92-86bd-92...
This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.
Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars.
I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.
The leaked AI memo had phrases like “productivity expectations will rise” and off comments about how they now know that LLMs “work better with context”.
It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going “AI first”, without really understanding anything beyond surface level.
It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think.
> It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think.
In the short term, perhaps. In the longer term, it matters whether it actually works.
In the long term, actual results will tell us what parts of the process matter.
1) extreme denial of the possibility of change anywhere ever (which is standard middle-class anxiety - your extremely specialized skills have been devalued, and now you're poor), and
2) cynicism is safe because most things fail. Cynicism is even safer when a bunch of people are trying to sell you something, because most of them are going to be con-men.
But I think the modern machine learning methods of the past few years are as important as the computer, and we're just starting the period between the computer and the transistor, during which time we're using vacuum tubes and giant iron rings to build them. When the AI-transistor comes along, it's going to be the engine of all human technological process for the next century.
edit: if there's anything that AI is going to be really, really good at, very soon, it's going to be teaching people languages. I don't have a problem with Duolingo going to AI; it wasn't exactly great before. It's just a brand and cartoons, not a method. Being that it wasn't great before, though, I have no idea what qualifies Duolingo to come up with language-teaching AI. I don't think gamification skills transfer.
If anything, they need to be furiously hiring extremely high level, extremely expensive AI people and second-language learning academics/linguists.
Duolingo lost its purpose as an app when it figured out that creating a translation army was pointless, and it lost most of its usefulness when it froze, then deleted the forums. Now it's just a cloud of IP. They might as well start selling a soda pop.
> “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.
We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain.
To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares?
As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.
We purposedly went that way, with no ads and a one-time payment option.
I feel that human touch is what makes our interactions special as everyone is different, unique, imperfect while being the same like everyone else, in a way...
Howewer as a relatively new and bootstrapped app in the market we have still some way to go. As a next step we are investigating how to add audiobooks and podcasts. Would someone be interested to cooperate?
To se what's inside: [1]
[0] https://www.latudio.com
[1] https://www.latudio.com/whats-inside
Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has quicker results.
So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and total user-hours is probably a good thing too, so don't let any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.
So what he's doing makes a lot of sense. Have to keep the stock high and sell off before reality kicks in. All of this money floating around incentivizes this behavior
They don't but this is also not the point and seems to account for the frustrations expressed in the conversation. Before I decided to get serious about learning Japanese I spent a few months on Duolingo. It taught me hiragana, katakana, a few kanji, maybe 1k words but obviously I couldn't really speak Japanese. But I also didn't expect to, I looked at it as "it's better than wasting another 10 minutes on twitter". And for that it worked perfectly well, honestly better than I thought.
This is the part that I'm shocked people don't notice. A young high school teacher who keeps up with the literature is going to be miles ahead of Duolingo pedagogically. One of the reasons I'm bullish on AI in language learning is that you could do fully-reactive, individualized TPRS* with AI. You could even simulate other students.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling
It's very similar to Duolingo, but quite cheaper and has videos and certificates.
<take my money meme>
For example Cambridge has a big program for English which tons of universities in the english speaking world use for admissions of foreign students
I don’t know if Busuu certificates are accepted anywhere major yet but it is not a bad idea, not every major language has standardized tests and rating systems like CEFR, there is room for new players especially in non European languages
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil
> Australia, Ireland and UK standard spelling of instill.
(And presumably South Africa as well)
If Duolingo was being started today by a solo developer, and they essentially just created some sort of wrapper over [insert LLM] to be a language tutor, would there be outrage? I suspect not. So, this seems to be more about getting rid of workers than it is about AI.
Would people use it? Probably, and I think it would VERY well - at least in comparison to current options. ChatGPT is a fantastic Spanish tutor (though I'm largely self-taught, through immersion). So, something that actually has some sort of structured curriculum and the LLM assesses your progress, gives guidance, explains why things are the way they are and how they compare (eg particular verb tenses and conjugations, order of words/syntax etc...), could surely be enormously useful. It probably wouldnt even be that hard to open-source some system prompts for a curriculum...
Not everything is always surface level.
The founder gets on podcasts and extolls the virtues of relentless A/B tests. They very openly admit that their primary value add is gamification (otherwise people churn from language learning apps).
I suppose the lesson here is that the words you say to Silicon Valley types you want to impress are sometimes overheard by your core audience, who may not like your opinions.
But it does sort of highlight that I think sooner rather than later, human curation will be a selling point, once AI apps become more the norm.
>human curation will be a selling point
Look at the success of TikTok. Automated recommendations enabled it to become one of the top apps in existence. There is not evidence that consumers care who curated the content. The quality of the recommendation is experimentally proven to be much much more important.
Narcissism blinders on, "you can develop an entire application in minutes, we can fire our whole staff".
Doesn't realize that if this was true he'd be fired as well.
The entrepreneurial mind isn't responding well to the realities and risks of AI. It appears to be oil and water.
I think it got me to try out a lesson a while back but it felt kinda half-baked and I never continued further.
My biggest issue with the site/app is the constant splash-screens/pop-up modals that take over the app/website to try and get me to upgrade. I get you guys want to funnel people towards the subscription, but being nagged daily when I'm just trying to look up a word is not making me more likely to bite.
Dr Ian Malcolm was spot on except it wasn’t Dinosaurs that turned out to be the idiotic creation instead it’s massively wasteful chatbots
Collectively, businesses haven't yet realized what many developers have - the significant hidden costs with AI coding.
We went through this with offshoring as well.
Duolingo is, in my mind, the categorical example of a tech company. Think about what it means to say "we're an AI first company". Who is the audience of a statement like that? Who reads that and thinks "heck yeah"? Its not customers; customers, at best, don't care, but at worst have had so many negative experiences with AI that it reflects very poorly. Its not employees; Luis von Ahn is digging a grave while saying "no we're not going to kill you, we're just killing the contractors". The answer is: Its a statement for Duolingo's real customers, not their users, but the US Financial Markets.
How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening, especially the one where customers leave, because customers are not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of contractors.
And, typically CEO’s say things like this to try to scare/get leverage on employees.
Duolingo was also growing - both in terms of earnings and number of employees. They can afford some looses.
The reaction to their AI announcement doesn't feel organic at all with oceans and oceans of content creators flooding feeds with samesy half-deprecating bashes of them using AI.
I think for every person who genuinely was put off, even more either didn't care, or were using ChatGPT for language learning and would try it to see what they mean by an AI-first approach.
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And for anyone who thinks they'd never take that kind of bad publicity on purpose: this is the brand that "killed" their beloved mascot a few months ago and similarly managed to saturate multiple channels with creators bashing them for that.
This is straight out of the "stop hiring humans" playbook.
The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out.
The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?