East Liberty-based Duolingo shared more details on its latest subscription tier following a recent earnings call announcement that it would partner with ChatGPT makers OpenAI Inc. to bring powerful generative artificial intelligence features to its language learning platform.
Dubbed "Duolingo Max," Duolingo Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL) will look to expand the capabilities of language learning for its English-speaking users who are learning French or Spanish on the platform's iOS app. For $29.99 per month on a month-to-month plan or $167.99 per year billed annually, Duolingo Max users will have access to all of the features in the "Super Duolingo" subscription tier as well as two new AI-focused features backed by GPT-4, which OpenAI released on Tuesday.
With "Explain My Answer," the Duolingo app will guide and interact with its language learning users to help explain why they got a given answer wrong during an assessment and in greater detail than what the app previously offered. These learners will be able to ask the app follow-up questions to get further guidance if needed.
The "Roleplay" feature of the new subscription tier is where the popular ChatGPT-element of the partnership really comes into play. By acting as an advanced chatbot, the Duolingo app will let Max subscribers practice carrying out an organic conversation in the language they are learning, like simulating how one might go about ordering a coffee at a cafe, among nearly unlimited other possible scenarios.
"I’m personally committed to using AI for good. Severin Hacker and I founded Duolingo because we wanted to improve the way the world learns," Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-Founder at Duolingo, said in a LinkedIn post. "Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available, and I am convinced that AI, and the recent advancements in generative AI, will take this mission even further, faster."
Duolingo hopes to launch the subscription tier for other languages in the future. The subscription is currently available for purchase in select countries following a two-week free trial on the platform.
"It’s definitely changed our engineering process internally," Bill Peterson, lead engineer at Duolingo, said in a blog post on OpenAI's website. "And the features we’ve put together have come out faster than they would have before GPT-4."
Duolingo reported 4.2 million paid subscribers during its most recent earnings quarter, up 67% from the 2.5 million users it previously had during the same quarter a year ago. It ended 2022 with $369.5 million in revenue, up 47% year-over-year, though it posted a yearly net loss of $59.5 million.
