Balancing Gamification and Learning Effectiveness

Luis von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. There are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and we talk about all that — but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning, generally. Duolingo is a global product, and there are a lot of tech tensions there, dealing with different user needs worldwide. We talk about it all in a pretty direct way... including all those unhinged things the owl does on social media.

Links: 

• Duolingo Introduces AI-Powered Innovations at Duocon 2024 (Duolingo)
• Video Call with Lily (Duolingo / YouTube)
• AI Boosts Duolingo As Company Posts First Profit (Nasdaq)
• Foreign Language Training (US State Department)
• Exploring My Villain Origin Story (Duolingo / TikTok)
• Duolingo cuts workers as it relies more on AI (The Washington Post)
• Why Silicon Valley Is Talking About Founder Mode (The New York Times)
• Duolingo's Math and Music lessons finally hit Android a year after iOS (Android Police)
• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on taking it back to basics (Decoder / The Verge)
• How Duolingo is using its 'unhinged content' with Duo the Owl (Digiday)
• How we turned Duo's butt into a viral Super Bowl commercial (Duolingo)
• A Duolingo employee has apologised for joking about Amber Heard (The Tab) 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24031882

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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