The techbro asswipes that run Duolingo have been making a lot of noise about AI lately, boasting about how much they’re going to use it while firing all of the actual human beings who used to make their lessons porky-happy

Their newest AI feature is a new lesson type called Video Calls where you chat with an AI bot in your target language. The bot asks you questions about basic topics and then does follow-up questions based on your answers while reacting and commenting on the stuff you say. It manages to kind of emulate the awkwardness of conversation practice in an actual language class with some rando you don’t know too well

I’ve only done a few of these because it feels really weird and creepy talking to a cartoon character on your phone that’s actually just a mask for an electricity-wasting corpo machine. Anyway, the AI just randomly brought up my pet that I mentioned a few weeks ago the last time I did one of these lessons. So yes, the Duolingo chatbot retains any information you disclose to it. Cool wtf

The kicker is that this shit is gated behind the Duolingo Max paywall which costs 170 bucks a year, or 13 bucks a month (I run a modded apk with unlocked paid features, I’m not paying a cent for a fucking app)

Edit: I actually wouldn’t be opposed to paying for an app, it’s the subscription model I’m vehemently opposed to. I will never rent an app or program

  • rhubarb [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    I’m convinced none of the people making these language learning apps understand what the actual use case is, I would be more likely to pay not to have to do this kind of stuff

    • regul [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      1 day ago

      idk

      I kind of like the idea of getting able to practice conversation without burdening an actual person with my dogshit grasp of the language.

      • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        I run an Ollama server and use it to practice Chinese. Same with Deepseek.

        Actually a nice use case for “AI”, but I would have no idea when the LLM model is making shit up, so there’s that. Still pretty damn useful until I’m good enough to not burden my Chinese friends with boring ass extremely basic conversations.

      • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        10·
        1 day ago

        From my limited experience with these video calls, I can see a chatbot like this being useful as an additional learning resource …if it was FOSS and able to be locally run

        practice conversation without burdening an actual person with my dogshit grasp of the language

        You’re just gonna have to face that hurdle at some point no matter what