Luis Von Ahn

So this is what very sophisticated millions of dollars of AI found.

It's funny.

Now, with notifications, you shouldn't be spamming.

And we're not spamming.

With Duolingo, we actually stop sending notifications after seven days of inactivity.

So if you don't use Duolingo for seven days, we stop sending you notifications.

Now, at some point, it occurred to us, if we're stopping to send people notifications, we should let them know.

So we started sending this notification to people, saying, hey, these reminders don't seem to be working.

We'll stop sending them for now.

You know what people do when they get this notification?

They come back.

Passive-aggressive.

Works for my mother, works for Duolingo.

These passive-aggressive notifications are really good at getting people to come back because they feel like our green owl mascot has given up on them.

So they come back.

And speaking of our green owl mascot, by the way, because all our notifications come from our green owl mascot and, well, he's passive-aggressive and also pretty pushy, this has given rise to a lot of memes on the internet that make fun of just the great lengths that he will go through to get you back to learn a language.

Now, Duolingo has entered the zeitgeist, and there's thousands of memes, there's SNL skits about it, and it's because we've managed to get people to want to learn a language by using the same techniques that mobile games and social media use to get people engaged.

And this is a really important point, let me say this.

I don't actually believe that there's a way to make an educational app be as engaging as something like TikTok or Instagram or mobile games.

But the good news is that, and by the way, the reason I don't believe that is because ultimately you have to teach people something, and it's hard to compete with cats and celebrities.