Ugh. You can just feel the management layers in this.
Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now. Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great.
But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Great, metrics! But you're pretty sure that, while customers do like this when you ask, you're probably not moving the needle. What to do? Well, you're a mobile game company, focus on what always works: go after the whales.
Now your product is an exclusive EVEN HIGHER tier. Get the art guy to make, like, an Amex Black Card but for the Owl. Make him do a superhero landing or something. Run a bunch of ads at the paid users to convince them that they'd totally be helped by this. They'll be focused on the users who already pay Duolingo money, so those are perfect advertising targets. And you'll be able to show real dollars that your feature is pulling in. Hooray! That VP spot is as good as yours, I bet!
I mean, sure, that's more or less how a company operates. You make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard.
In fairness to duolingo, nearly everything duolingo does is like this. They are extremely metric and process driven (for better and worse of actual users).
I can tell because when I tried to figure out the cost of the existing Super Duolingo, I was unable to do so. The https://www.duolingo.com/super page gives me lots of information about tiers and benefits but never mentions a cost. I'm sure telling you hurt metrics. Fuck those guys.
I'd be very interested to know exactly what metrics allow them to ignore the fact that their most-recent app redesign has been, from what I can tell, unanimously disliked and shown to frustrate their userbase.
I think they can't make it free (or with their old subscription model) because OpenAI APIs are pricey. It would quickly eat up whatever money they can generate. They also hope their product is getting THAT much better you want to pay.
Making features without any monetization strategy and abandoning afterwards because you can't even justify the salaries of the devs working on it is way better? It's like you're mad at modern product development, ignoring the reasons why.
Making a monetization strategy without understanding the feature is just as useless. If it's new you have to build it in order to understand it. You need to invest some time into the features first. If it doesn't stick then discard it early or iterate on it and use the information gained on building better features.
I use Duolingo, but only free. They've given me free access to their super tier twice now for a few days or a week each time.
I assume at some point they'll do the same to try to give me a taste of this new product and maybe it'll be good?
Either way I'll wait and see for a free option. I understand your skepticism. But I hope it ends up being a fun (and importantly: effective!) new way to learn.
Great, you've just boiled down how online services are making money from their applications. Company x online uses x popular tactics for making money off of the services they provide, shock.
It's a bit of a boring story really.
Yes AI is 'so hot right now' so why not leverage it? It's hot for a reason and maybe just maybe, it is actually beneficial to the product you provide, so why wouldn't you implement it. I can see another angle if they didn't where people would start to say Duolingo is starting to become dated, due to lack of features such as AI/ML.
This is the second time in the last couple of days that I've encountered a page hiding the pricing as good as they can.
I wanted to see what this Max-plan costs, so I go to duolingo.com. Nowhere is a "Pricing" link to be found. So I go to "Super Duolingo", because that costs something and therefore should have a price.
"Test 2 weeks for free", "Free | Super | Super-Family" with "Test 2 weeks for free", but nowhere what I'll have to pay after those two weeks.
Click on "Test 2 weeks for free": Submit your personal information for creating an account, no pricing information.
What is this? How much does the Super even cost?
Management to Web-Designers: "No, don't put the pricing, we're irrationally expensive", or what?
I find that so incredibly off-putting. Whenever I see a company intentionally hiding pricing information I move them all the way to the back of the line for serious consideration. If I don’t manage to entirely put the product out of mind I’ll usually look for competitors or ways to get the service without paying for it.
If they’re going to be user-hostile, become a hostile user!
I didn't see any pricing information while logged out either, but as soon as I clicked the free trial button and then logged in, the next page that appeared was pricing. It's $12.99/month for an individual plan billed monthly, $6.99/month for an individual plan billed annually, and $9.99/month for a family plan (2-6 members) billed annually. I’m in California in case that matters.
I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-featured app.
Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are no vignettes like in Spanish and French where you watch a conversation and then summarize what was said. They just throw in new concepts with no instruction whatsoever. So you see a word that you know is a verb, but the ending is one you've never seen before. There's no chart or examples, or even explanation that "now we're going to teach you past tense," or whatever. Just suddenly there's a bunch of new stuff you don't understand and you have to go to the Internet to look up what the hell is happening. God forbid you ask a question on the forum. The Greek mods are stereotypically rude and controlling. Nothing is ever the fault of the app, it's always the user's fault, even when native English speakers are telling them, "The English translation of this sentence doesn't make sense and is not valid English."
So yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay for an AI that is likely giving wrong advice anyway.
Not relevant to the discussion but possibly for you: I discovered this 100% free no-signup audio-only course for Greek through a previous HN post. Amazing approach (like Michel Thomas but more charming and modern and free!):
Of all the language apps I used Duolingo has by far been the least useful. I've spent hundreds of hours but took barely anything away (for FR, ES) If you must pay go to a proper app with structured learning, like babble or something language specific.
I’m Greek and I’ve never heard of LanguageTransfer before (it’s even created by another Greek, Michalis).
I used for a few months the free tier of Duolingo in the past, but it wasn’t to my liking and although it helped a bit, I can’t say it taught me Spanish (perhaps the paid version is better).
For sure I’m going to try the free Spanish course from LanguageTransfer ;-)
Thanks! I read about it previously on HN, but haven’t had a chance to check it out. I’m going to do that now. For what it’s worth, I have learned stuff with Duolingo, but it could be so much more (for me) if they’d get feature parity with some of the other languages. I get that Greek probably doesn’t have a lot of people trying to learn it, but it’s sad.
Before the UX update at the end of last year, I was trying Arabic (something like 2 years of daily lessons and I still couldn't manage the alphabet), Greek (felt worse than before the preceding UX change but I couldn't say why exactly), Esperanto (the audio sounded like it was done by a volunteer at their own home?), Dutch, German, and Spanish.
I'm still doing German, because I live here now, but I gave up on all the rest the day that update happened.
Oh my goodness the voices and animations are annoying. Whenever the young boy appears I have to mute my speakers.
I'm sure they're hyper-focused on "engagement metrics" to the detriment of all else, just like how old-school OK Cupid turned into just another Tinder clone.
This is funny because in Spanish, the young boy (Junior) and his father (Eddy) are both absolutely fucking hilarious. But I 100% get what you're saying because I did some of the French lessons, almost identical content and Junior came across as snooty. It really does go to show that choosing the right voice actor makes a world of difference. The Spanish casting is absolutely phenomenal but the other languages don't seem to quite nail it. Part of me wonders however if this is actually a cultural difference. Perhaps I personally find the Spanish ones phenomenal because I am personally more aligned with Spanish speaking values, culture, humour and communication methods than other more reserved cultures such as those of German and French.
Well, if they are so focused on engagement metrics then surely they would notice an active user drop since the big UI update? Both my partner and I were using the app daily and completely dropped it since then. Going from the reviews we are not the only ones. It is just such a clusterfuck and I'm still feeling bitter about it.
Personally I find the German voice actors super annoying. The Indonesian ones seem fine. Funny how this is experienced differently for different people :)
I occasionally do Duolingo for a little Japanese practice but I don't think it does a good job there either. The Japanese learning experience seemed far worse than the Spanish experience. Maybe it's because I knew more Japanese and passed in to the higher levels, or because I'm more aware of the errors, but I think it's more due to the fact that Japanese is further from English and Duolingo wasn't designed around it. It is missing tools around Kanji and regularly "speaks" using the wrong reading (since characters can be pronounced differently in different contexts). There are no tools around learning characters or grammar, no short stories or other supplemental exercises, etc. The language pack feels like a bit of an afterthought rather than a core offering.
The translations already aren't great, and I can't imagine polluting it with some unvetted AI translations would help at all.
You shoud google for duolingo grammar notes. You'll find some for every course I imagine. The same people who originally created those courses made unofficial wikia or other pages and populate unofficial discords.
I don’t understand. Why aren’t the notes in the app? I can already search for language information on the web. But I’d prefer it was just in the language learning app I’m using already.
As a Duolingo user who has refused to upgrade, if they roll the two into one it might entice me, but not for another higher tier above what they've got. But I guess there's a subset of super-users who may be keen.
To be fair, Super Duolingo is pretty good. Dropping the Ads alone is totally worth the subscription if you're a daily user (it's the only app I use daily aside from Messages, Email etc).
I'm very curious about Max though ... the explain your answer is something I'm really interested in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing (which is where I make most of my blunders!).
I've been partnering Duolingo with ChatGPT for a while now. I'll ask ChatGPT "Why was this wrong? What was my mistake?" and it explains exactly what I needed to know every time.
I think this combo is going to work fantastically well.
This is interesting because my impression is that LLMs perform poorly on non-english languages[1]. This is likely 'just' a corpus size problem - but it's not like that is going to be fixed any time soon. That said, at least in language instruction there's a lot of meta material that will be helpful. I wonder how Duolingo is detecting when GPT-4 is hallucinating.
LLM outputs in Standard Chinese are fluent and coherent but the grammar style and choice of words are clearly non-native. I think the source training material just isn't as comprehensive as English, and contemporary Chinese Internet is packed full of latin abbreviations and obscure homophones/wordplay due to its evolution under severe censorship.
Awesome observation re: censorship. Last I looked into training sets, Chinese and English were the frontrunners by far in available corpus size, and benefit from a certain amount of government-enforced-homogeneity (a standard mode is taught in compulsory education).
Arabic is safe from automation due to its limited exposure to the open web and extreme variability of dialects, and Icelandic will remain obscure due to sample size and the fact that they mostly speak English online.
They don't perform poorly (depends on how much corpus training the language received). https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13349. The important thing is you don't need an equivalent number of tokens for an equivalent performance. So even though GPT-3 only had 1.8 % french by word count, it can speak fluent french. There's positive transfer between languages.
Also GLM-130B trained on equal English/Chinese (200b tokens each. 400b total) speaks both just fine.
The Twitter thread you linked is just somebody pointing out poor performance in Tigrinya. That doesn't mean it performs poorly on all non-English languages. It's performing poorly on the languages with little representation in the corpus, but those are also the languages that are least likely to be learned on Duolingo. Duolingo users mainly learn languages like English, Spanish, French, German, etc. and the models do just fine with these languages.
For what it's worth, ChatGPT is able to hold a meaningful conversation in Czech (pretty difficult, latin script, ~11M speakers). I can almost tell it's a bot, but it could also be a PR person from a big corporation who can't even afford to talk like a normal person anymore.
The GPT-4 post/paper covers this: GPT-4 does other languages excellently, and performs on par in many other languages with GPT-3.5 in English. As people found that useful...
Does it actually say how much Duolingo Max would cost? I do not see anything in that article or on their website. I don't have the app, maybe it's already live and pricing is available there.
I deleted Duolingo years ago when it felt like I knew everything it had to teach me, but was still far from fluent in the language. I assume it's gotten better, and would consider trying this new feature.
I've been successfully using ChatGPT for learning German in the last month or so. It does a great job enriching my plain B1 level sentences with some fancy verbs or adjectives and pointing out my mistakes.
How does that work? Do you just tell it that you are learning and to correct your mistakes, then converse with it in German? Does it infer your German level from your own chats with it?
Yes, you can tell it that you are learning the language at the beginning of the conversation in plain English and ask it to correct any mistakes. You can easily start a bilingual conversation with ChatGPT, some random example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/112xgp2/practicing...
To show you what I meant when I mentioned "enriching sentences", I've just generated an example of a B1-level English sentence improved by ChatGPT.
User: Please improve this sentence: "Many people want to learn languages because they like to travel"
ChatGPT: "Learning languages is a popular pursuit because it enables people to travel and explore different cultures with greater ease."
It works similarly with other languages.
As for my German level, it wasn't evaluated by ChatGPT but by an external assessment exam and I only mentioned it to add some more context to the story. Frankly, I probably wouldn't trust ChatGPT's assessment in this regard.
Readit News
Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now. Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great.
But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Great, metrics! But you're pretty sure that, while customers do like this when you ask, you're probably not moving the needle. What to do? Well, you're a mobile game company, focus on what always works: go after the whales.
Now your product is an exclusive EVEN HIGHER tier. Get the art guy to make, like, an Amex Black Card but for the Owl. Make him do a superhero landing or something. Run a bunch of ads at the paid users to convince them that they'd totally be helped by this. They'll be focused on the users who already pay Duolingo money, so those are perfect advertising targets. And you'll be able to show real dollars that your feature is pulling in. Hooray! That VP spot is as good as yours, I bet!
The issue is: from beginning on and for a long time Duolingo advertised with "Learn a language for free. Forever." :-(
I would say this one feels more later stage capitalism than usual, all it's missing is some tiktok influesters hyping it up.
And the first thing that comes to mind is to complain about them adding a pricing tier? I know HN tends to be cynical, but really?
Tout le jeu, jamais le même, nous parlons couramment maintenant grâce au brillant hibou d'action.
A légpárnásom tele van angolnákkal!
I assume at some point they'll do the same to try to give me a taste of this new product and maybe it'll be good?
Either way I'll wait and see for a free option. I understand your skepticism. But I hope it ends up being a fun (and importantly: effective!) new way to learn.
It's a bit of a boring story really.
Yes AI is 'so hot right now' so why not leverage it? It's hot for a reason and maybe just maybe, it is actually beneficial to the product you provide, so why wouldn't you implement it. I can see another angle if they didn't where people would start to say Duolingo is starting to become dated, due to lack of features such as AI/ML.
Deleted Comment
I wanted to see what this Max-plan costs, so I go to duolingo.com. Nowhere is a "Pricing" link to be found. So I go to "Super Duolingo", because that costs something and therefore should have a price.
"Test 2 weeks for free", "Free | Super | Super-Family" with "Test 2 weeks for free", but nowhere what I'll have to pay after those two weeks.
Click on "Test 2 weeks for free": Submit your personal information for creating an account, no pricing information.
What is this? How much does the Super even cost?
Management to Web-Designers: "No, don't put the pricing, we're irrationally expensive", or what?
If they’re going to be user-hostile, become a hostile user!
Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are no vignettes like in Spanish and French where you watch a conversation and then summarize what was said. They just throw in new concepts with no instruction whatsoever. So you see a word that you know is a verb, but the ending is one you've never seen before. There's no chart or examples, or even explanation that "now we're going to teach you past tense," or whatever. Just suddenly there's a bunch of new stuff you don't understand and you have to go to the Internet to look up what the hell is happening. God forbid you ask a question on the forum. The Greek mods are stereotypically rude and controlling. Nothing is ever the fault of the app, it's always the user's fault, even when native English speakers are telling them, "The English translation of this sentence doesn't make sense and is not valid English."
So yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay for an AI that is likely giving wrong advice anyway.
https://www.languagetransfer.org/about
Of all the language apps I used Duolingo has by far been the least useful. I've spent hundreds of hours but took barely anything away (for FR, ES) If you must pay go to a proper app with structured learning, like babble or something language specific.
I’m Greek and I’ve never heard of LanguageTransfer before (it’s even created by another Greek, Michalis). I used for a few months the free tier of Duolingo in the past, but it wasn’t to my liking and although it helped a bit, I can’t say it taught me Spanish (perhaps the paid version is better).
For sure I’m going to try the free Spanish course from LanguageTransfer ;-)
Before the UX update at the end of last year, I was trying Arabic (something like 2 years of daily lessons and I still couldn't manage the alphabet), Greek (felt worse than before the preceding UX change but I couldn't say why exactly), Esperanto (the audio sounded like it was done by a volunteer at their own home?), Dutch, German, and Spanish.
I'm still doing German, because I live here now, but I gave up on all the rest the day that update happened.
Oh my goodness the voices and animations are annoying. Whenever the young boy appears I have to mute my speakers.
I'm sure they're hyper-focused on "engagement metrics" to the detriment of all else, just like how old-school OK Cupid turned into just another Tinder clone.
Personally I find the German voice actors super annoying. The Indonesian ones seem fine. Funny how this is experienced differently for different people :)
The translations already aren't great, and I can't imagine polluting it with some unvetted AI translations would help at all.
You just have to know to look for them...
I don't think this is going to enthuse anyone who's already regretting subscribing to your video game?
I'm very curious about Max though ... the explain your answer is something I'm really interested in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing (which is where I make most of my blunders!).
I think this combo is going to work fantastically well.
[1] https://twitter.com/asmelashteka/status/1630966233217605632
Arabic is safe from automation due to its limited exposure to the open web and extreme variability of dialects, and Icelandic will remain obscure due to sample size and the fact that they mostly speak English online.
Also GLM-130B trained on equal English/Chinese (200b tokens each. 400b total) speaks both just fine.
At least that's impressive in another way, that the knowledge model behind the pun seems to be a bit independent of language.
>We also constantly review AI-generated explanations in Roleplay and Explain My Answer to ensure that the answers are factually correct
I deleted Duolingo years ago when it felt like I knew everything it had to teach me, but was still far from fluent in the language. I assume it's gotten better, and would consider trying this new feature.
An article from Yahoo [0] says it's "$29.99 per month or $167.99 per year", but they don't link to a source.
[0] - https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/duolingo-launches-subscrip...
To show you what I meant when I mentioned "enriching sentences", I've just generated an example of a B1-level English sentence improved by ChatGPT.
User: Please improve this sentence: "Many people want to learn languages because they like to travel"
ChatGPT: "Learning languages is a popular pursuit because it enables people to travel and explore different cultures with greater ease."
It works similarly with other languages.
As for my German level, it wasn't evaluated by ChatGPT but by an external assessment exam and I only mentioned it to add some more context to the story. Frankly, I probably wouldn't trust ChatGPT's assessment in this regard.