Let's start with some credit where it's due. Duolingo got millions of people to open a language app every single day. That's a real achievement, and plenty of people have their first words of Spanish or Japanese because of it.
But look at how it gets you to come back. Streaks you don't want to break. XP, leagues, and leaderboards. On the free tier there's a limit on how much you can practice, first hearts and now, for many people, a daily energy meter, and when it runs out you wait, watch an ad, or subscribe.1 Those are clever mechanics, and they're very good at one thing: getting you to show up tomorrow.
Showing up is not the same as learning. A streak tells you that you opened the app. It doesn't tell you whether you can order lunch, follow a conversation, or explain why you'd say in one sentence and in the next. When a product is paid for attention, it slowly learns to optimize for attention. We think learners deserve something built around a different goal.
Adults can handle structure
Here's the belief underneath Convo: if you're an adult who decided to learn a language, you don't need to be tricked into it. You need a clear path, honest feedback, and someone to explain things when you're stuck.
So Convo leans into structure instead of hiding it.
The course is a map, not a list. Under the app is a graph of the language, with concepts connected by what has to come first. Each concept comes with a plain statement of what it lets you do, like "you can say when something happened," instead of a grammar label. Your lessons come from the parts of the map you haven't covered yet, so you're never marched down one fixed path with everyone else.
Every new concept starts with a short taught lesson, then a check you have to pass. Only after that does it turn into practice, review, and homework. Learn it, prove it, then use it.
And we tell you where you actually stand. Convo tracks a CEFR band for each of the four skills, and it's a coverage band: how far through the map that skill has taken you. It isn't a quiz score dressed up as a certificate, and Convo won't tell you you're B1 because you had a good week.
There are no hearts to lose, no leagues, and no XP. When you're doing a drill, you'll see how many you've gotten in a row, because that's genuinely useful to know. That's as far as the game goes.
Why AI makes a real tutor possible
The best way to learn a language has always been a patient tutor who knows what you've covered, notices what you keep getting wrong, and can explain any sentence you point at. The problem has always been that tutors are expensive and hard to schedule, so most people never get one.
Large language models change that. They're unusually good at exactly the things a tutor does: explaining grammar in plain words, answering "but why?" about a specific sentence, holding a conversation at your level, and never getting tired of the same question.
On their own, though, they're not a course. A chatbot will happily teach you whatever you ask, forget what you learned last week, and has no idea whether you're ready for the past tense. That's where the structure comes in.
In Convo, the map decides what comes next, and the AI works inside it. The tutor is on almost every screen, and it already knows which lesson you're in, which sentence you just got wrong, and which word keeps coming back in your reviews. Ask "why is it fui and not era?" and you get an answer about the sentence in front of you, not a generic grammar lecture. If you let it, the tutor also remembers what you've covered between sessions, so your third lesson knows what happened in your first.
Nineteen practice activities cover the pieces that go wrong in real life, from sounds you can't tell apart yet to the rhythm of fast speech. Speaking gets feedback on what a native speaker would have said. The AI makes each of them feel personal, and the structure makes sure they add up to something.
What we're building toward
We want Convo to feel like the tutor you'd hire if you could: organized, honest about your progress, and always happy to explain. No tricks to keep you around. If you come back tomorrow, we want it to be because you learned something today.
We'll keep writing here about how that works in practice, including the parts we haven't figured out yet.
Class Central, "Duolingo Breaks Hearts for Energy, Drains Free Learning" (2025), on the move from hearts to energy and the unlimited energy that comes with a paid plan.