
The scoop on reCAPTCHA founder's new startup Duolingo. - gregg1982
http://tedxcmu.com/videos/luis-von-ahn
======
merloen
Interesting, but I'm skeptical.

I studied translation, and noticed to my surprise that the foreign language
part of translating is fairly easy, unless it's highly technical, or contains
dialect or slang.

The hard part was the command of my native language. I was pretty literate,
but the translations I produced weren't good enough - they were accurate, but
wooden, and they stayed too close to the original. What I had to learn was my
own native language.

So I have doubts about the quality of the translations, and I have doubts
about how they're planning to merge translations from different users, which
sounds like a very tricky problem.

And it looks like the only exercise they use is to translate the foreign
language (e.g. Spanish) into the native language, which will teach you to
read, but not to write, speak or understand Spanish.

Nevertheless, a fascinating experiment, and an extremely ingenious idea.

------
Vivtek
Speaking as a professional translator, I gotta say it's time to transition
back out of professional translation. Another five years, maybe, and I'm going
to be out of a job.

It was lucrative while it lasted: the Internet made it possible for me to do
well as a freelancer, but now the Internet is going to supersede me. Which I
knew. It's just scary to be right in this particular instance.

This idea is immense in its brilliance and in the impact I expect it to have.

~~~
enjo
You'll be just fine. As someone who has employed a number of translators in my
professional career, the biggest issue is trust. Translation is _scary_
because it's one thing you have no ability to self-validate. While duolingo is
incredibly smart, they're going to have to go a LONG ways towards building
trust that what they're producing is truly what my app, brand, whatever wants
to convey.

That's going to take awhile.

~~~
Vivtek
Nah, it's not just Duolingo. Google is making frightening inroads where it
counts - they just won a hugemongous contract from the WIPO that a _lot_ of
people were hoping for (I was asked to be part of the team by at least four
agencies placing bids). Statistical methods work pretty well for a lot of
applications, and patents are probably one of those applications.

Actually, I think Duolingo is going to help the translation market for a while
- anything that brings people closer together between languages is going to
encourage more people to need quality translation - but they intend to train
massive numbers of people to do what I do for a living. And once that system
is in place and honed on Wikipedia, they'd be insane not to employ it for
placing contract translations. The notion of employing multiple human
translators and combining their input to produce a better overall output is
fantastic! It really is! The only reason nobody's done it yet is the expense
of paying for the translation multiple times - and that's just about to go
away.

No, seriously. I've been predicting five to ten years for the limit for the
industry already. This just tells me how right I am: things are going to start
getting freaky weird for me.

It's about damn time, too. I'm bored sick with translation. I want to get back
into programming anyway. If I can figure out how to combine them, I'm going to
be a happy man.

------
StavrosK
I'm blown away by the simplicity of this. Also, there's something that feels
weird about taking two things people pay for (translation and learning a new
language) and somehow simultaneously making them both free.

This is both exciting and ingenious.

~~~
w1ntermute
> there's something that feels weird about taking two things people pay for
> (translation and learning a new language) and somehow simultaneously making
> them both free.

The exact same principle that is behind reCAPTCHA, except in that case it's
CAPTCHA generation & OCR.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, I guess you're right...

------
izuzak
A bit older, but way better presentation by Luis von Ahn on duolingo:

The Royal Society - "Augmented intelligence: the Web and human computation"
(Louis von Ahn)
[http://royalsociety.tv/dpx_royalsociety/dpx.php?cmd=autoplay...](http://royalsociety.tv/dpx_royalsociety/dpx.php?cmd=autoplay&type=solo&dpxuser=dpx_v12&pres=506)

\+ has excellent discussion at the end.

~~~
newman314
tl; dr summary please?

~~~
mortice
The content of the presentation is much the same, albeit pitched at a
different audience. To get straight to the discussion at the end (which is
impossible effectively to summarise for you and well worth the time) skip to
about 26:00 in the video.

------
vpdn
I saw his tech talk at google a few years back where he shares his ideas for
image tagging. Absolutely amazing work. Watch if you haven't yet:
[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143#)

------
vpdn
Too bad the video doesn't go into details on how the application really works
from a user perspective and how merging is done.

------
trickjarrett
This makes so much more sense. I heard he was working on duolingo but could
not figure out how a translation application could work as a captcha. The
video explains that it isn't a captcha technology, instead it's an app about
translating, wholly disconnected from his previous two "monumental"
inventions.

I look forward to working with it. It seems like it's another excellent step
forward for independent study along with the Khan academy.

------
EGreg
This is amazing. I wonder how they combine the beginner stuff though. Also,
captchas have the benefit of being adopted by lots of websites, while this is
a standalone destination. They may not get 10 million active users, but if
they do, it will be because so many people want to learn a language. How will
they market the site?

~~~
StavrosK
As a free way to learn a language, I guess.

~~~
EGreg
Sure, but the economics of the marketing are not the same. Websites needed
captchas, so it made sense. They saw other websites using them, and the link
to the recaptcha was embedded. Are they going to embed language learning
modules in language learning programs?

~~~
StavrosK
You shouldn't compare it to reCAPTCHA just because it's made by the same
guy...

~~~
thefreshteapot
I agree with your point, yet as the parent points out. The uptake will be
less, it has to be. Websites and people learning languages are vastly
different size wise.

I also think the numbers he quoted about buying learning material are a little
off. Purely because they are quoting numbers which cover a broad range of
media. Whereas duolingo is the web and maybe mobile apps.

I personally think the market is huge, I just felt the numbers were sexed up
for effect.

The "avg" of user sentences to create a better version sounds very exciting
from a tech point of view.

------
amichail
I haven't heard anything about grammar in the videos. People are expected to
absorb the grammar magically somehow?

~~~
vpdn
The software he mentions (rosettastone.com) doesn't work with grammar either
if I remember correctly. Instead, for one spoken sentence, they display
various images of which you have to pick the right one (i.e. the image the
sentence corresponds to).

It's the child approach: When you were a kid, you probably didn't have any
clue about english grammar either, yet you were able to produce perfectly
valid english sentences.

~~~
amichail
Why do you think such an approach would work with adults?

~~~
vpdn
I didn't say that it does. And I didn't say that it doesn't either.

------
Tomek_
The actual duolingo part in this video starts at about 12 minutes mark. Before
that it's about reCAPTCHA and such.

------
codybmusser
This was the best of the talks at TEDxCMU.

------
amichail
Duolingo could have the unintended effect of making English even more dominant
by teaching everyone English.

~~~
_Lemon_
I'm not sure whether you're intending to pose that as a problem -- why should
language be a barrier to anything? It could open the possibilities to a lot of
people in less well off countries.

What would be a problem (and is kind of assumed in what you're saying) is if
people stopped learning their native language in favour of English.

~~~
amichail
I'm sure many people will feel that their culture is being threatened if
English becomes even more dominant.

~~~
_Lemon_
Yes, and I meant to say that would be a bad thing. For example, Welsh is
compulsory in schools in Wales where most will know English fluently, there is
quite a political effort to keep it going.

------
karanbhangui
I'm so excited by this technology. Can't wait to learn Spanish.

------
lucywoozie
I submitted this right before :)

