Duolingo doubles the number of courses thanks to AI

Duolingo, the leading mobile language learning platform, has announced the launch of 148 new courses, more than doubling its current offering and marking the largest content expansion in the company’s history. Duolingo says this rapid rollout was achieved through the use of artificial intelligence.

With this update, Duolingo's seven most popular non-English languages – Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese – are now available across all 28 supported interface languages, which the company says "expands learning opportunities for over a billion potential learners worldwide."

"Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses. This is a great example of how generative AI can directly benefit our learners," said Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. "This launch reflects the incredible impact of our AI and automation investments, which have allowed us to scale at unprecedented speed and quality."

The company goes on to say that it usually takes years to create a single course, but using AI, a content sharing system, and internal tools, it was able to create 148 in less than a year. Duolingo's new approach, which it calls "content sharing," allows the team to create a "high-quality base course" and quickly prepare it for a dozen different languages.

The newly introduced courses focus on the beginner CEFR A1 and A2 levels and include features such as Stories, which help users develop reading skills. Other features include DuoRadio, which helps users better understand new languages by listening. More course updates will be rolled out in the coming months.

As a reminder, at the end of April, Duolingo officially announced that it would begin replacing contractors with artificial intelligence. In a statement from CEO Louis von Ahn, it was stated that contractors would gradually stop working on what AI can do on its own, and new employees would be evaluated on their ability to use the technology. Similar statements were previously made by Shopify's CEO, who told employees that they would have to prove that AI cannot do the job before asking for more resources and people.