Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn wants you addicted to learning

Today, I'm talking with Luis von Ahn, the cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, the popular app that teaches languages. It's an interesting time to be in the language business: if there's anything the current state of AI tech can do, it's babble away in different languages with people who aren't quite fluent in what they're hearing.

That means there are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and Luis and I talked about the new features in something called Duolingo Max, which offers chat conversations with some characters and even video calls with an AI avatar named Lily.

I wanted to talk about all of that, but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning generally. If you're like me, you've stopped and started using Duolingo several times; if you're an overachiever, you've got a streak going and might even have a streak to maintain today. That streak is the key, and you'll hear Luis come back to that as a big idea several times.

Engagement is the key, he says, because simply showing up is the cornerstone of actually making progress with language learning. You can't teach someone who isn't there, so over time, Duolingo has become more and more of a game, because people like to play games.

But there are real conflicts between gamification and actual learning. Luis is happy to admit that that conflict exists, and he's given it a lot of thought. For him, the gamification is the important part because not only does it bring you back to Duolingo, keeping the business humming along nicely, but he says it also produces the results in language proficiency that Duolingo is aiming for. 

Luis got pretty deep into explaining where the money comes from. As you might guess, it's from iPhone users in wealthier countries like the United States. And some technical decisions Duolingo made very early on mean the iOS version takes priority - it can take a year or more for features to roll out on the Android version of the app.

But Duolingo is a global product, where the biggest chunk of learners are actually trying to learn English - and those users are way more likely to use an Android phone and to want or need a free version of the product. There are a lot of tensions here, and you'll hear Luis talk about his own childhood in a poorer country and how that informs his decisions.