Looking for language learning suggestions: family member has used Duolingo for years, gave them family license to get rid of ads, but then Duolingo fired most of staff and switched to AI inaccuracies
It's a decent service if you want to speak to a robot owl, but getting ever more incorrect
Platforms or the people learning are Linux and Android
Self-hosting not an option at this time
Looking for to/from European languages for now
#LanguageLearning #Duolingo #Babbel #RosettaStone
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No. They did not fire *most* of staff. They let go 10% of the *contract* workers. The 600 regular employees were not affected.
You might want to specify want languages you are interested in. Different services seem to do different languages better or worse.
Duolingo is pretty much the king of *practice*, though lacking in other regards such as grammar and accompanying memes.
@number6 Laying off contractors is still laying people off
"Duolingo is introducing 148 new language courses that were created with generative AI"
"we need to create a massive amount of content", missing from that sentence is a word like correct, good, or valid
I built some very primitive tooling for generating language exercises long ago, still needed expert review to make sure the exercises made sense
Quality tells me Duolingo is skipping that verification step
In Dutch, on the desktop, I see very little sign of AI at work. To have access to AI conversations you have to pay for "Max", which is too much.
Other language companies are also using AI. Memrise pretty much over-turned it's community-based language material in place of AI-driven conversations and activities.
It would not surprise me if the other major players are also using AI behind the scenes, but more discreetly.
The original statement was that *all* the employees had been laid off which was factually incorrect.
The problem of loss of jobs related to AI is the same ongoing problem as with all automation. The solution is systemic -- a redistribution of wealth. But the propaganda machines have successfully convinced people that this is bad.
There are entire factories today that run in the dark, because there are no people there.
@number6 Duolingo does make it easy to rip through exercises
It also works well via both web and android app from a technical perspective
