Google Is Now Rolling Out an AI-Powered Duolingo Competitor

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Google Is Now Rolling Out an AI-Powered Duolingo Competitor

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Google is rolling out two new AI-powered features for Google Translate this week, and it might not be good news for Duolingo. The app now generates practice sessions for you to either listen or speak along with. These lessons are generated by AI, and, according to Google, "intelligently adapt to your skill level." It follows a different AI-powered experiment Google launched back in April called "Language Lessons," though Google Translate's implementation seems a bit more basic.

This feature is rolling out this week on iOS and Android in beta. It doesn't seem to have landed on my Translate app yet, but here's how Google says it'll work: First, Google Translate will ask you how skilled you are in the current language: "Basic," which means you know some words and phrases; "Intermediate," which means you can express opinions and chat about everyday things; and "Advanced," which means you can talk about a myriad of subjects in-depth. (There is also going to be a "Just starting" option, but it's not yet available.)

Once you make your choice, you can share your motivation for learning the language—either something you write yourself, or something you choose from the app. (You can skip this if you want, though I imagine it helps the AI focus on lessons tailored to your learning goals.) From here, the app generates experiences for you to practice with. For example, it might suggest a scenario in which you practice asking about different meal times. If you choose this scenario, you then pick whether you'd like to practice listening or speaking. Your listening practice may play you a short clip of someone speaking in your target language, then have you select words from a list you recognize. Speaking practices may have you saying phrases that appear on-screen.

   

It's simple, but it could be effective. Google says it worked with "learning experts" to develop these tools based on the latest research in language acquisition. If I can learn how to better speak and understand Portuguese for free, that sounds good to me, but only time will tell whether this is on-par with a dedicated language learning app like Duolingo.

Live Conversation upgrades

The other new feature here is an upgrade to the existing "live conversation" feature. The idea is to turn on live conversation and to start speaking to the other person as you normally would. Then, the app translates what you said, and shows that translation to the other person.

The new upgrade, however, appears to push the feature a bit further. Now, the app will translate what you're saying in real time, so the other person can read the translation as you're speaking. If they want or need to hear the translation in full, the app will read out for transcript once you're done speaking. Google says this feature works for live conversations in over 70 languages, including Arabic, French, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, and Tamil, and are available in Google Translate for users in the U.S., India, and Mexico.

You can see an example of how this new experience works from this video. When I tried it out, the app does seem to translate pretty quickly, which I can only imagine makes conversation easier:

   

Source: Google Is Now Rolling Out an AI-Powered Duolingo Competitor