Free Language Learning Service Duolingo Comes To Android, Expects This Will Double Its User Base To Over 6M-Project Olympus - Carnegie Mellon University

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Free Language Learning Service Duolingo Comes To Android, Expects This Will Double Its User Base To Over 6M

Duolingo, the popular free language learning service, just launched its first mobile app for Android in Google’s Play store. Until now, the service was only available on the web and iPhone, but as the company’s founder Luis von Ahn told me earlier this year, the Android version has long been on the roadmap.

For the most part, the Android version will have all of the features of the current iPhone app, but Android users will have to wait a few weeks before they will get to use Duolingo’s recently introduced speech recognition. Thanks to this, the service’s iPhone users can currently go beyond just focusing on reading and writing in a new language and also start speaking. The service then uses speech recognition to check how close the user’s pronunciation is to a native speaker.

On Android, von Ahn tells me, this feature will also launch soon, but it wasn’t included in the current release yet as they are a bit harder to implement and the team decided to focus on getting a polished Android app out as soon as possible. The Android version will also soon allow users to cache about an hour’s worth of lessons for offline use...Read More»

By: Frederic Lardinois: TechCrunch