Duolingo: Conversations with AI

Duolingo as a language learning application is an incredibly convenient and reliable source for any language learner. With this, they also recognize their limitations in providing users with conversational practice. Its voice recognition feature and AI chatbots fall short in providing users with the tools they need to reach oral proficiency. Duolingo wanted to leverage community to create language immersive experiences that will ultimately help its users master fluency. This was a rather interesting start to an extensive project with my team, with all of us being Duolingo users at one point or another. The hard part was finding out what the IMPORTANT things were that people wanted from Duo. It's wonderful to want to be able to learn a language by absorbing it into your brain like a sponge, yes. Maybe one day we'll get there. Thankfully, we were able to narrow down a few things through the interviews we conducted, as well as a small observational study of an active Duolingo user that gave some key insights into issues our users were running into. -Having to use multiple apps for language learning was a hassle. We often saw users leave Duolingo to attain other features on other apps available in the space. (E.G. social spaces for learners, conversation practice) -Interaction is king. Users more often than not expressed higher success rates in learning and comprehension of languages when interacting with other speakers.