With AI, we can generate high-quality educational content quickly, allowing us to expand into new subjects like chess, math, and music, enhancing our learning offerings. We started working on the chess course eight months ago, initiated by two people who had no coding or chess experience, and they managed to prototype it successfully before we added engineers to productionize it.

We were able to create the chess course in just nine months, the fastest time ever for a new course at Duolingo.

Chess helps you think logically, and we believe it fits within Duolingo's mission to enhance cognitive skills.

In the early days of Duolingo, we realized that keeping users motivated was the biggest challenge in language learning, which led us to incorporate game mechanics into our lessons.

We realized that instead of creating standalone apps for new subjects like math, we should integrate them into the main Duolingo app to enhance user experience.

We initially planned to build a chat app for gaming, but we thought we could bootstrap it through a game. When the game failed, we realized we could launch the chat app directly instead.

In designing Highrise, we focused on creating an experience that feels like both an app and a game, which is crucial for user engagement.

As we branch out into subjects like math and music, the biggest challenge is creating a learning experience that is as engaging and effective as our language courses.

From day one, Duolingo was technology-first, and now we refer to it as AI, which has significantly improved since our inception.