Duolingo’s new ‘AI Tutor’ mode – what we know
Duolingo appears to be experimenting with an AI Tutor mode.
It hasn’t appeared in any of my courses as yet, but it recently popped up for this user on their Spanish course (iOS), available behind that little blue speech bubble at the bottom.
It would appear that the mode is divided into two buckets.
The first, a pre-selected group of topics determined by where you’re at in your course. For instance, the first topic in the image above covers a recent grammar concept, and gives you the opportunity to dive further into it.
The second, a custom chat field, where you can ask the ai (aka Falstaff) seemingly any question of your choosing.
E.g
- what are all the present tense conjugations of manger?
- why do the french put a space between certain punctuation marks?
- why do you keep updating my course and assuming i’m familiar with all this new material? 🙃
You get the idea.
Here’s what the user had to say about their experience:
Just updated the app a minute ago and found a new tab that appears to be an AI tutor. It lets you ask questions and do practice exercises based on whatever topic you choose.
EDIT: this is version 7.140 of the app. After trying out this feature for hours I realize it is still in the early stages of development. I can come up with any topic I want and the system creates practice exercises on the spot. The explanations of concepts and mistakes are much better and the AI doesn’t hallucinate as much compared to “explain my answer” but it can still happen. I can also ask follow up questions which is really useful if I still don’t understand something and need further clarification. Voice recognition doesn’t actually work unfortunately. Overall, it looks like a solid addition to the app but it needs a lot of polish. Let me know your experiences when it rolls out for you guys.
Of course, you could just as easily hop between Duolingo and ChatGPT and achieve much the same result. But i think the big advantage of this is that Duolingo has a ton more context as to where you are in your language as opposed to an external LLM.
Not only that, but also the suggestion that you can “create practice exercises on the spot”. Does this mean you can create your own Duolingo-style lessons, like the ones that appear along the path? If so, that’s something I could really see taking off, especially if there’s something you’re really struggling with or you’d just like to dive into something very particular.
But I’d be keen to see Duolingo take this a step further and fully bake it into the ordinary path lessons themselves. ‘Explain My Answer’ is fine, but I still find it so limited; I want to be able to ask questions about specific aspects of a question, not just tap bubbles with generic surface-level explanations. It needs to be tailored to what we’re actually struggling with.
But let’s see. Definitely one to keep an eye on.
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