Duolingo Launches 148 AI-Powered Courses Following AI-First Strategy Shift

Duolingo announced the launch of 148 new language courses on Wednesday. These courses were generated using the company’s native artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The ed-tech learning platform introduced these new courses just days after the company CEO revealed a shift to an AI-first strategy. The courses were created within a year and they more than double the platform’s total offerings. Notably, Duolingo is planning to integrate AI into every single division of the company, and to phase out the contract workers with AI tools eventually.

Duolingo Introduces New AI-Generated Language Courses

In a newsroom post, Duolingo announced the launch of the 148 language courses, the largest content expansion in the history of the company. Typically, creating a single new course could take multiple new years. However, with the use of generative AI, the platform has been able to significantly expedite the process, the post added.

“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.

With this content expansion, Duolingo’s seven most popular non-English languages — French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Spanish — are now available to all  28 supported user interface (UI) languages. The company claims that this expansion will allow more than a billion potential learners globally.

As part of its AI-first strategy, Duolingo’s new approach to develop courses with generative AI is called “shared content systems.” The company essentially creates one high-quality base course, which is then customised for different languages.

The new courses enable Spanish and Portuguese (Latin America) speakers to learn Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. Similarly, most European language speakers can also learn these Asian languages. And for Asian language speakers, all of the platform’s top seven non-English languages are now available. Notably, earlier, they only had access to the English language.

Earlier this week, Duolingo CEO publicised an email shared with the employees highlighting the need to shift to an AI-first model. The shift will include Duolingo’s reduction in using contract workers for work that can be managed by AI. Additionally, the company also plans to make AI skills a key hiring criterion and performance evaluations to include the usage of the technology.