All posts tagged: Duolingos

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world. Von Ahn’s mom, a doctor, spent all of her extra income to send him to private school, giving von Ahn opportunities that most of his peers never saw. It is, as he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, the reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with the goal of making high-quality education free and widely available. Today, the company reaches more than 130 million users worldwide, from immigrants learning new languages to celebrities like George Clooney. Inequality may have inspired von Ahn, but his company now …

Duolingo’s Free Plan Is Getting One of My Favorite Learning Features

Duolingo’s Free Plan Is Getting One of My Favorite Learning Features

Duolingo, one of our CNET picks for the best language learning apps, announced Monday that its Explain My Answer feature will be coming to free plans on iOS starting Jan. 1. This is something I have been wanting to see on the free version of the app ever since I tried to use it to learn Italian before traveling to Rome. Duolingo launched Explain My Answer in 2023, but it was limited to Duolingo Max, which costs $30 a month or $168 a year. The feature explains grammatical rules, like grammatical gender, and provide further examples to help you understand why you got something wrong. Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. After you answer a question in a language lesson correctly or not, an Explain My Answer button will appear near the bottom of your screen. When you tap this button the feature will explain the different parts of the question on either one or multiple slides depending on the question. I have found this feature helpful …