Duolingo gave me temporary access to their AI slop machine subscription, “Duolingo Max” which costs an extra $120 a year, twice what I’m paying for a Duolingo Super family plan right now.
The main way you’d use Duolingo Max is through faux-video calls with Lily, Duolingo’s misanthropic cartoon teenager.
I can see why someone might like the idea of practicing their conversational skills in their target language with an AI who has no feelings and won’t be offended when you make mistakes, but the functional reality of it today is terrible.
The calls only record your voice, and translate it to text before passing it on to OpenAI’s ChatGPT for a reply that’s translated into speech for the Lily character to speak either by Duolingo or OpenAI’s services.
Sometimes the effect worked alright, but the conversations are short and Lily often seemed slow to either interpret what I was saying or just slow to reply. Other times Duolingo’s character couldn’t understand what I was saying at all. As depicted in the transcription Duolingo saved on the right, without asking. There is also no way I’ve found to delete these rough transcriptions that I’ve found.
As you can see, I had to repeat myself a half dozen times here before it understood I was saying “Eichhörnchen,” the german word for “Squirrel.” It is a word that is difficult to pronounce accurately but any native German speaker would have understood what I was saying and either corrected my pronunciation if it was off, or moved on. Instead Duolingo’s Lily got hung up on this and then the call ended.
This wasn’t the only call I had, but it was indicative of what the experience is like, and shows how inhuman the experience is.
Another time, I was on a call and had to say goodbye in German to an actual human in my family and the AI Lily interpreted this as me saying goodbye to her, but this didn’t end the call. The cartoon character just awkwardly stared at me until I hung up the call.
All of the calls are brief, presumably due to limits with Duolingo’s API access to ChatGPT, but that’s fine. You don’t need to try Duolingo Max for long to understand it’s a real waste. I believe Duolingo should always be judged by their corporate motto, “free. fun. effective” and again, this feature fails all three tests.
Duolingo Max is far from free at $240 a year for a family subscription, or $168 a year for a single person to use Max. It isn’t fun to be misunderstood by the bot or wait for its reply. It isn’t effective to be heard not by a person, but misinterpreted by a speech-to-text engine and have that farmed out to a third-party-service that isn’t actually hearing what you are saying.
A few extra notes:
- Native German speakers often have a difficult time pronouncing the english word “Squirrel”, understandably.
- While researching this post I found that Duolingo’s link for attributing the open-source software they use is broken. It’s linked from this page.
- Duolingo also makes it very difficult to find any of these prices which as far as I can tell aren’t published on their website outside of being prompted to subscribe to these plans in either the app or website.
- That these “video calls” don’t actually record your video is good. there’s no need for Lily to see your face which as far as I know wouldn’t help existing large language model based AI slop machines interpret your discussions.
- Duolingo Max also advertises role-playing scenarios which are just a text chat version of these calls, this eliminates the speech interpretation which might be more useful, but it was incredibly ironic to have Duolingo’s Lily character asking me my thoughts on protecting the environment while ChatGPT’s AI is presumably burning through tons of resources to produce mediocre results.
- What frustrates me even more as a parent is that Duolingo is advertising Duolingo Max to my kid. The iPad version of Duolingo is prompting my kid to ask me to upgrade our family plan to Duolingo Max.
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