These characters can also prompt you with things to say if you’re unsure. Right now, there are three bot personalities to choose from: Chef Roberto, Renée the Driver, and Officer Ada. They can alleviate “the fear of embarrassment that comes from talking with native speakers,” Kron tells Inverse. In addition to serving students who don’t have access to a tutor, Kron indicates that the bots may be useful to those who are just plain shy about making mistakes in front of a human teacher. When users say new things or make new mistakes, the bots add that data to their ever-expanding knowledge sets. The bots can understand and respond to “thousands of unique responses” right now, but they get smarter the longer they operate.

In large part, this will be made possible by the users themselves. “By 2020, our goal is for the Duolingo Bots to become as advanced as a high-quality 1-on-1 tutor,” Michaela Kron, the company’s PR manager, tells Inverse.Īn example from Duolingo's website. Not only are they working on adding other languages, but they hope to dramatically increase the bots’ AI capabilities. Currently, the bots are available for only four languages - Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, and all for English speakers - but the company has bigger plans. So, in October 2016 Duolingo created “Duolingo Bots,” an artificial intelligence service that will talk to you in the language you’re learning. It really helps to have a good teacher to improve pronunciation and fluency.īut not everyone has access to a language teacher or can afford a one-on-one tutoring experience, and Duolingo’s mission has always been to give everyone equal access to good language education (the company has promised that its app will always be free). Self-taught students of a foreign language often find speaking to be their biggest challenge, particularly if they aren’t immersed in the language. You may know Duolingo as the world’s most popular language-learning app, but by 2020, you may know it as just “my tutor.”

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