“If a course has low quality, we will take action with the moderators,” von Ahn noted. Good news volunteers can also participate in. These moderators will be able to accept any contributors they want, but will ultimately be in charge of the courses.įor now, this project will launch as a beta, and the team will evaluate its approach based on the feedback it receives and data, such as the number of people who return and what fraction of learners get exercises correct. You may view the languages that Duolingo is actively developing courses for in the Duolingo Incubator feature. These moderators will apply through our website and will be vetted by us.” Already, Duolingo has received applications from what he calls “very impressive moderators” – some of which even have Ph.D.s in the languages they applied for. “The main idea is to have moderators that own each language. “This is something we’ve spent a lot of time working on,” von Ahn said. After it kept getting requests for new languages, though, the team decided that this would be the only way to keep up with demand.Īs with all crowdsourcing projects, ensuring a high quality of courses will be what makes this project succeed or fail. In that year, three new languages were added to the incubator for English speakers: Latin, Finnish, and Scottish Gaelic. Mori had been due to launch on February 21, 2021, and. Prior to Duolingo closing the Incubator, Mori and Tamil were in the early stages of development. It’s currently 6 done, so we may be able to expect it at some point in 2023. I really look forward to benefiting from the course though We discussed Duolingo a while ago in the Spanish forum and the Questions forum and we were. Duolingo itself has a crowdsourcing element to it, too, as the main idea (and business model) behind the service is to teach its users a language while they also translate texts at the same time.Īs von Ahn told me, though, crowdsourcing wasn’t on the service’s roadmap from the beginning. Currently, Xhosa is the only language course showing as hatching on Duolingo’s official list of languages. In its current form, Duolingo currently offers lessons in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and English and has attracted over 10 million users so far. The most requested languages on the service right now include Chinese, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.įor von Ahn, resorting to crowdsourcing seems like a natural answer, given that he was also the founder of reCAPTCHA, which uses CAPTCHAs to transcribe books with scripts that OCR software often fails to recognize. Since its launch, Duolingo has received requests for more than 500 languages and the relatively small team that works on the service is obviously unable to create lessons for all of these. As the company’s founder Luis von Ahn told me earlier this week, these can even include fictional languages (something tells me Klingon lessons will be among the first). The Language Incubator, which is opening its doors today, will let the service’s community members add new lessons and languages. Duolingo, the increasingly popular online language learning service, announced one of its most ambitious projects to date.

Duolingo incubator inside look