Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Duolingo’s bot with help you learn a language the natural way – by using it

By

duolingo ios app new bot
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Bots are the new black when it comes to artificial intelligence. Every major technology company on the planet seems to be experimenting with bots or, in some cases, betting the farm on the idea that speaking to an intelligent agent and getting a natural-language response will be the new wave of computing.

Whether that’s a safe bet remains to be seen, but one area where a bot makes perfect sense is in learning a new language. Duolingo, the maker of a variety of language training solutions, is joining the bot club, according to Mashable. Learning a language is difficult enough without opportunities to engage in actual dialog, and Duolingo is apparently heading in the direction of putting a learning partner right in your pocket.

Recommended Videos

Generally speaking, bots are snippets of AI — or live connections to into entire cloud-based machine intelligence backends — that plug into an app, such as a messaging app or Duolingo’s languages app, and engage the user in conversation, answer questions, and respond to other input. Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Skype, Google Assistant, and a number of other technologies are bots, and they promise to expose more people to AI while making systems of all kinds more responsive.

Related

Duolingo’s bot is presently available for its iOS app, and supports Spanish, French, and German for now. The bot responds to conversation, naturally, and helps out the language learner by providing corrections, engaging in dialog, and suggesting appropriate responses. The bot is smart enough to start out slowly and ramp up the complexity as a user progresses, and can even recognize the context of a conversation and respond accordingly.

You can try out the bot now on your iPhone or iPad by downloading the app for free from the App Store. The app requires iOS 8.0 or higher, and doesn’t seem to be available yet for Android or Windows phones. If you’re looking to learn a language with the least amount of stress and embarrassment, then perhaps Duolingo’s new bot is just the practice partner you’ve been looking for.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock
Computing Writer
Mark has been a geek since MS-DOS gave way to Windows and the PalmPilot was a thing. He’s translated his love for…
PowerPoint will use ChatGPT to create entire slideshows for you
Microsoft Copilot creating a PowerPoint presentation for a user.

Microsoft has revealed its thoughts on how artificial intelligence (AI) could shape how we work in the years to come -- and how it plans to help guide those changes. The announcement was made by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro at a company event titled The Future of Work with AI.

As the name suggests, the show was focused on how artificial intelligence (AI) could affect how we work, both now and in the future. More specifically, the tech giant discussed how it will add AI smarts into its suite of Office apps.

Read more
Optical illusions could help us build the next generation of AI
Artificial intelligence digital eye closeup.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn’t comprehend it like that. Like some low-level hallucinatory experience, your mind trips out; perceiving the static image as the mouth of a black tunnel that’s moving towards you.

Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye’s pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision.

Read more
Lambda’s machine learning laptop is a Razer in disguise
The Tensorbook ships with an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU.

The new Tensorbook may look like a gaming laptop, but it's actually a notebook that's designed to supercharge machine learning work.

The laptop's similarity to popular gaming systems doesn't go unnoticed, and that's because it was designed by Lambda through a collaboration with Razer, a PC maker known for its line of sleek gaming laptops.

Read more