Duolingo will launch math app by the end of the year

The most popular language application in the world, Duolingo is preparing to expand its activities in other areas of education. By the end of the year, the company will launch a math app, for now only in English. There is no forecast for the development of the tool in Portuguese.

The beta version was shown this Friday (26) during Duocon, the brand’s 10th anniversary conference in June. There they will also announce a redesign of the language app and the inclusion of Zulu, a language spoken in southern Africa.

“We basically took the recipe that makes the learning app successful and moved it to a different topic,” says the company’s global marketing director, Manu Orssaud, of the math app. That recipe is gamification.

Orssaud refers to the application’s structure, which uses features similar to those of an electronic game. Changing levels is similar to the experience of passing a level, for example. There are tasks to be completed and the sound effects are reminiscent of a game.

“Gamifying is our heart, the key to user retention”, says the professional, who has stints on Spotify and Playstation. “If people have fun using our product, they stay.”

The concept applies to other investments. In May of this year, Duolingo opened a Mexican restaurant that gives discounts to anyone who gets a question right in Spanish. The venture, which is located in Pittsburgh, in the United States, was also driven by a regulatory force that forces the company to have commercial property, according to Orssaud.

The teaching of fictional languages ​​to attract fans of series and movies is another example. Since 2018, the platform has made available Klingon, the language of the classic nerd Star Trek, and a year later it started teaching High Valyrian, the language of the Game of Thrones series. According to Orssaud, about 40% of users who enter the app in these languages ​​switch to a working language.

“The same thing happened with Emily in Paris,” says the director. Duolingo partnered with streaming platform Netflix after seeing the buzz the series caused among Brazilians — its second-biggest market — on social media. “We see that culture influences language,” he says.

The company is experiencing a period of growth in the wake of the pandemic, which has favored its business through the social isolation adopted in different countries. In the second quarter of this year, the app had 49.5 million monthly active users, 31% more than the same period last year.

“We don’t see ourselves replacing anything,” says Orssaud of a competition with face-to-face teaching. “We want to create an experience that is, for some people, everything they will use to learn a language, and, for others, complements what they study elsewhere.”

Duolingo went public on the US Stock Exchange in July last year, and since then its shares have dropped more than 30%, following the downturn that tech companies face in the post-pandemic hangover.