Von Ahn used his experience as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing to launch Incubators, which pull together linguists, native speakers and book readers to design a fully optimized course. In the past few years, Duolingo has embedded artificial intelligence into the app, to analyze mistakes and slightly alter the course to fit user requirements.Īs Duolingo started to grow, users asked for more obscure and fictional languages to be added. It regularly runs tests to find an optimal way to design a course, testing users on how quickly they learn part of the language and changing the formula to smooth the learning curve.

Users can compete against friends and random people by completing courses and receive rewards for streaks.ĭuolingo also separated itself from other language learning services by using data to its advantage. Instead of building a classroom-style product in an app, Duolingo took cues from the world of gaming to enhance the experience and keep users engaged. Over 10 million people downloaded the app in the first 12 months. In November 2011, the team launched a private beta and within a month 300,000 people had signed up on a waitlist. Duolingo was a hit even before its official launch.

Duolingo app cost