Chatbots are all the rage this year as companies in sectors ranging from media to e-commerce jump on the bandwagon and develop AI-powered messaging bots.
Language education platform Duolingo, however, says it just launched “what may be the first-ever useful bot.” The Duolingo chatbot for on-demand language conversation practice is available Thursday in Duolingo’s iOS app.
Currently, the bots are available for English speakers to practice conversation in Spanish, French and German. Additional languages will become available within the next few months.
Gina Gotthilf, Duolingo vice president of growth, said that the chatbots will be helpful because most language learners spend insufficient time practicing conversation.
Most people, Gotthilf said, are able to practice their language conversation skills in two scenarios--either by traveling to the country where the language they are learning is spoken or by hiring a private language tutor with whom to practice.
The benefit of Duolingo’s new conversation bots is that they allow users to practice language conversation on demand and for free.
Moreover, the prospect of misspeaking and making a mistake is often daunting, and the fear of embarrassment prevents many language learners from practicing their language conversation skills with other people. But as Duolingo outlines in its press release, its AI-powered conversation partners “won’t judge you.”
Currently, the Duolingo conversation bots respond to thousands of different answers, according to Gotthilf. Conversations are structured around different scenarios and topic areas such as fashion, animals, art, travel, food, living, health, etc--and the scenarios come with different bot “personalities.”
For example, to practice your food-related Spanish conversation skills, you could have a conversation about pizza with a “chef” or a conversation about health with a “doctor.”
If a user gets stuck and doesn’t know or remember how to respond, they can click “help me reply,” and a few suggested responses (as well as their English translations) will pop up.
And if a user tries to discuss something unrelated to the scenario or conversation at hand, the app will prevent the user from sending that message. While all conversations currently have to be typed out through a messaging interface, Duolingo is working to develop voice recognition to enable users to have oral conversations with bots.
“One of the main reasons people learn languages is to have conversations,” said Luis von Ahn, CEO and cofounder of Duolingo.
“Students master vocabulary and comprehension skills with Duolingo, but coming up with things to say in real life situations remains daunting. Bots offer a sophisticated and effective answer to that need.”
But what exactly are chatbots and why is there so much hype around them right now?
According to chatbots magazine, a chatbot is “a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface.”
For example, within the Facebook messenger interface, a user can chat with Uber to request a ride, or with Nordstrom to make a purchase, or with CNN to get the day’s news--and so on.
Bots have become incredibly popular recently because people are now on average spending more time in messaging apps than they are on social networks.
But Gotthilf believes Duolingo’s new conversation bots offer something that others do not. Most bots exist to facilitate some sort of interaction--a purchase or exchange of information, etc.
They are a means to an end. But in the case of Duolingo, conversing with the bot--practicing your language conversation skills--is an end unto itself.
“A lot of chatbots out there are not super useful,” Gotthilf explained. “They tend to add complications to people’s lives instead of simplifying. The Duolingo chatbot is cool because it’s all about the conversation itself.”
