[upbeat music]
Hi. My name is Luis von Ahn
and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo.
Today I'm going to tell you about the state of our company.
But before that, I want to thank you all for spending time with us.
Everything we do, we do it for you
so we're very happy and honored that you've been here with us.
Now, Duocon has become a really huge thing.
Last year, we… is the first time…
Last year was the first time we did it entirely online.
We had a lot of people with us.
We had 118,000 live attendees from more than 152 countries.
It was a huge event.
We're hoping this year is going to be even bigger than last year
and we're also super happy
that we're going to have Duocon again next year.
It's Duocon 2022.
We're hopefully going to be able to have it in person in New York City,
but of course, for those of you who cannot make it,
it's going to be entirely streamed live
so that you can be with us throughout the day.
So next year, Duocon 2022.
Very happy about it.
Now, you know, when I talk about Duolingo,
the most important thing to know about Duolingo is our mission.
Every time I talk about Duolingo, I like to bring up our mission,
to develop the best education in the world and to make it universally available.
There's a couple of things to say about this. First,
notice that our mission is not about language learning.
Even though everybody knows us for our language-learning product,
our mission is more general. It's about all of education.
The way I see it, the two biggest problems that humanity has
are global warming and economic inequality.
We're working on reducing economic inequality
and we believe the best way to reduce economic inequality is through education.
Our mission is not just about language learning,
it's more general and you'll see
as I'm going to talk about at the end of this talk,
we're expanding to teaching other subjects, not just languages.
But for the last ten years, the main thing we've been doing is teaching languages.
And I'll talk mostly about languages, of course.
Now, as a company our strategy, we're working on five things.
These are the main five things we work on as a company
and they are these:
The first one is, we are working on growing our number of learners.
By now we have about 40 million monthly active learners.
We're, by far, the largest language learning platform in the world,
we're the most popular way to learn languages in the world.
But we're not done. There's many more people in the world.
And so we are continuing to reach more and more people
so we're growing our number of learners.
What we do to grow our number of learners is making Duolingo more and more enjoyable
so that people use it a lot so they don't stop using it,
so that people tell their friends. So we work a lot on that.
Another big area that we work on is in teaching better.
Of course, the ultimate goal of Duolingo is to teach you languages
so we work a lot on teaching better.
The largest team at Duolingo
is the team that is dedicated to teaching better.
I'll talk a lot about some of the initiatives we have
and you've heard a lot during Duocon,
but really, the main thing, the biggest thing we work on
is teaching people better.
The third big initiative we work on is growing our number of paid subscribers.
So the people that subscribe to Duolingo Plus.
Most of our users use Duolingo entirely for free.
In fact, only 5% of our users pay to subscribe.
However, those people that pay to subscribe really help
because they support the rest of the users
and they're the ones who support this operation.
We're very thankful for the people who subscribe,
but we're working a lot on basically adding features
and making the subscription more and more enticing
so that we can fund the other initiatives.
We're working on growing our subscribers. The fourth big thing we're working on
is trying to become the proficiency standard
for how much people know a language.
So today, if somebody asks you how much French do you know, for example,
the common answers that people give are,
"I'm intermediate in French."
That's just not a very good answer because it doesn't mean much.
Another common answer is,
"I took four years of French in high school." Also doesn't mean much.
What we would like to do,
we'd like it to be the case that, in a few years,
when someone asks you how much French you know
you say, "I'm a Duolingo 65," or "I'm a Duolingo 85" or something.
So we're working on adding a proficiency score to the app
so that anybody can talk about their proficiency in the language.
And one of the big efforts that we have on this
is also the Duolingo English Test.
We have a standardized English proficiency test
that you have heard about.
We're using that score and we'll try to translate it to many other languages.
The hope is that we can become the proficiency standard in a few years.
We're working a lot on that.
The last initiative we're working on is expanding beyond language learning.
We already launched Duolingo ABC,
which is an app to teach early literacy.
But we're going to be working on other subjects I'll talk about,
teaching other subjects and I'm going to talk about that.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about some changes to the product,
features that we've been adding and work we've been doing on the product
because these are very exciting initiatives.
The first thing that I'm going to talk about
are efficacy and just how well we teach
and also why efficacy is important.
In particular, efficacy is very important
because it's ultimately what we're trying to do.
Our mission is to develop the best education in the world,
make it universally available.
So, you know, we're really just trying to teach better.
We're very happy with our efficacy.
I'll talk a bit about these results.
The most important thing, or the first thing to understand,
is that our courses are aligned
to the Common European Framework of Reference.
Some people call it CEFR.
And what the Common European Framework of Reference does
is it gives you kind of six buckets of how well you know a language,
there's really a seventh bucket which is "you don't know the language."
So it's: "you don't know the language," then there's A1, A2,
then there's B1, B2, C1, C2.
So the A levels are the beginner levels, the B levels are the intermediate levels
and the C levels are the advanced ones.
So C2, for example,
is somebody that is just very, very highly proficient in a language.
It's not even enough to be a native speaker.
Many native speakers of a language are actually level C1 and not C2.
C2 is native speaker and also you have a really good command of the language.
The way I think about it is kind of Obama-level speaking.
It's just somebody that speaks really, really well.
The A levels of course are beginners,
but already if you speak a language to level A2,
you can do a lot of things.
For example, you can ask for directions, you can have simple conversations
you can probably buy things, etc.
At Duolingo, we try really hard to teach people to level B2.
B2 is a level that is enough for people to get a knowledge job in that language.
So for example, if you want to get a job at Duolingo,
we speak English here in the company and your English level was B2,
that would be perfectly fine.
And that's true of most companies. B2 is enough for knowledge jobs.
What we're trying to do with Duolingo is teach in all our languages
to teach to level B2.
We're not there yet for all our languages,
but that is the thing we're working on really hard.
And last year at Duocon
we actually had a presentation about our effectiveness,
and this is a study that we're very proud of.
Here's what we did, just for those who didn't see it last year.
The study that we ran was as follows.
We got people who started learning on Duolingo
who specifically said they had either no prior proficiency
or very low prior proficiency in French or Spanish.
These are people that basically didn't know French or Spanish.
And we had them learn on Duolingo. And then
whenever they reached Unit 5, when they completed Unit 5 on Duolingo
which is about half-way down the Spanish or French course,
we asked, "Did you use anything other than Duolingo to learn?"
And of those who only used Duolingo
we said, "Okay, these are people who were leaning Spanish on Duolingo,
came to Duolingo without knowing any Spanish or French.
They learned and didn't use anything other than Duolingo."
To those people we gave a standardized test
to figure out how much of the language they knew.
Then we compared their scores
with scores of people who rather than learning on Duolingo
were learning by taking university classes.
And what we found
is that people who studied on Duolingo learned the equivalent
of people who have taken four university semesters of French or Spanish.
But what's most amazing
is it took about half the time for people to learn that on Duolingo.
That's something we're very proud of.
Now, this study that we presented last year measured two things:
it measured listening proficiency and reading proficiency.
We measured those first because they're the easiest to measure
and it's kind of what everybody compares language knowledge with.
But, of course, we want to measure other types of proficiency.
For example, speaking proficiency.
Now, this year I'm very happy to announce the results of a study that we just ran.
You can find it on duolingo.com/efficacy.
And a study that we just ran
to measure speaking skills.
So what we did here is pretty similar
to what we did for listening and reading skills, we took people
who had no prior proficiency in either Spanish or French
used Duolingo and finished Unit 5.
This is kind of the first part of the course, the beginner part.
Now, internally, Unit 5 for us, if you finish Unit 5,
what we expect for you to be able to know is A2 of a language.
That's the internal, kind of what we try to achieve.
And so what we did here is we took these people who finished Unit 5
and then we measured how good their speaking skills were.
And what we found is that over 50% of the people who finished Unit 5
had speaking skills of at least A2.
So you can see here, in both Spanish and French
above 40% of the people had speaking skills of A2
and then a few more,
so in Spanish was another maybe 20-some percent
had speaking skills of B2 or better
and then in French another about 10%
had speaking skills of B1 or better.
In total, for both languages, more than 50% of the people
had the speaking skills that we expected.
That's something we're proud of,
that means that Duolingo is very good at teaching you speaking.
Now, in addition to that,
we're also, we're in fact improving how well we teach speaking.
And let me tell you about a few things we're working on, adding to the app.
Not just with speaking, other things. The first one is with speaking.
We've started adding conversation lessons.
You can see them on iOS so far.
We're going to be adding them soon to Android.
And these are in certain languages, in French and in Spanish,
we have conversational lessons
where the idea is that we take everything you've learned on Duolingo
and here… we get you to practice it
with something that feels like a real conversation,
where you're maybe either asking for directions
or buying something or eating at a restaurant.
So these are these very real scenarios
and you get to have an entire conversation where you speak one part of it.
And whenever you don't pronounce something well,
we try to really drill down the pronunciation, etc.
The idea is for you is to really practice real-world conversations with it.
The hope is that with this
you'll even be able to improve your speaking even more
than what we had with before.
That's something we're very proud of.
Another big product that we're very proud of is the feature we call Hoots.
You can see it on the web right now. It's available for French.
Pretty soon it's going to be on iPhones
and we'll be rolling it out to other languages.
And this is a feature that tries to improve how well you write.
So the idea is to practice your writing.
What it is, is a daily writing prompt
that we automatically grade
and we tell you whether you said something right or wrong
and if you made any mistakes in your writing.
So you can imagine every day we may ask you things
like "What did you have for breakfast today?"
Or "Please describe your hometown" or "What's your ideal vacation."
And the idea is to write a short paragraph in the language that you're learning and
automatically through artificial intelligence
we tell you whether you wrote it well,
and if you didn't, we try to give you corrections
for how to really write it.
Now, one of the reasons why it's taken us so long to get here
is because developing the artificial intelligence to be able to grade
free written text has been pretty difficult.
But we're very proud of what we have so far.
Here you can see more screenshots.
The idea is you're writing
and also we give you recommendations about how to write certain things.
There's a lot of help we give you if you don't know how to write a given word.
You can look it up and it'll tell you how to write it.
The idea is that you can write these relatively long paragraphs,
especially for beginners.
And then we can grade the whole thing without ever using a human.
This is something we're proud of
and will really help you practice your writing.
Another thing I'm happy to announce
is that we'll be adding five new languages pretty soon.
These are very highly requested languages.
They're for English speakers, so people who already speak English
will be able to learn five more languages.
The first one is Tagalog.
We're also going to be adding two South African languages, Xulu and Xhosa.
We'll be adding Maori and we'll also be adding Haitian Creole.
You're going to see us be adding languages every single year.
The five that we decided to add are these and we're very excited by it.
Another big initiative that we have for this year
that we're very proud of
is a full revamp of Duolingo for Schools.
So, Duolingo is used in a lot of schools.
According to our best estimates,
approximately, 40% of language classrooms in the United States
use Duolingo.
We have a tool, Duolingo for Schools, which is for teachers.
The idea is that students use Duolingo normally,
but Duolingo for Schools allows teachers to track what their students are learning.
You can find Duolingo for Schools at schools.duolingo.com.
That tool has been there,
but this year we're doing a complete overhaul of this tool.
It will look a lot better.
We have a massively simplified onboarding flow
and also a massively simplified student account creation
and a lot more new features,
so the hope is that teachers will have a much better time
using Duolingo in schools than they did before.
And that's something that we're very excited about
because we know how much Duolingo can help in schools,
especially when schools are not fully in person.
So very happy with this.
Another big thing, I already referenced this, Duolingo ABC.
Last year we launched an app, we talked about it, called Duolingo ABC,
which is a literacy app, an early literacy app.
This is for kids ages roughly 3 to 6, to learn how to read.
Right now it only exists in English.
So these are kids who already know English. We don't teach them English, they know it.
But we're trying to teach them how to read in English.
The app has been growing very nicely
and since we launched it last year it's received a number of major awards.
For example, it was chosen
as one of Time magazine's best inventions of 2020.
It won the Kids' Screen Best Learning App.
It won a Webby Award.
It's won a lot of awards and it's because it's a free way to teach how to read.
Our goal with this app is really to reduce worldwide illiteracy.
It's crazy that today many children around the world
don't learn how to read or how to read very well.
For example, there's a billion adults in the world that are illiterate.
We're hoping to combat that with an app that is free
that can be used throughout the world to teach kids how to read.
That's something we're excited about.
You'll see us put a lot more effort on this
and the app is going to continue getting better
and actually this brings us to one of the things that I talked about
that we're working on which is expanding beyond just teaching foreign languages.
You know, a big thing that we're doing is teaching literacy.
We're also going to be teaching Math.
And the idea is that we're trying to find subjects
that improve people's opportunities in life.
So obviously teaching somebody how to read
is massively…
It can massively improve somebody's life.
We're also working on a Math app to teach elementary school Math.
This is kind of how it's going to look like.
The basic idea is it's going to be similar to Duolingo
in that it's going to be a gamified fun way to learn Math.
In fact we'll be using a lot of the same technology
that we're using with Duolingo to teach languages.
We're going to be using it to teach elementary school Math.
So we're very proud of this.
This app hopefully will come out to the public next year
and again, it's something we're extremely proud of.
So what's next?
We're going to continue, of course, expanding to teaching other subjects.
I talked about literacy, I talked about Math.
Our mission is to develop the best education in the world
and make it universally available,
and as long as there are people in the world
who can't read,
or there are people in the world who don't know basic Math,
or there are people in the world who want to continue learning things,
we still have a lot of work to do.
One of our operating principles inside the company at Duolingo
is "we haven't won yet",
And I really believe we haven't won yet
until we have taught everything that there is to teach.
So we're going to be continuing to expand the subjects that we teach
and we're going to continue working really hard on this.
And that's it for Duocon 2021.
We have people for you watching us all over the world.
Thank you for spending time with us,
hearing about our company and our different initiatives.
Also thank you to all the speakers.
This has been a great conference.
And I hope to see you in person next year in New York City
or, if not in person, online next year.
And thank you all for watching.