Duolingo

[krasnoludek]

In CMU alumni's recent newsletter, I read a piece about Duolingo, a free language-learning app. While reading the article, I learned the following useful tidbit: Initial funding came from Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm with technology investments that include Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Zynga and actor-producer Ashton Kutcher.
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Comments

[rdore]

Wait, you read the cmu alumni newsletter?

[krasnoludek]

For both the paper and the electronic updates, I usually glance at the headlines and then delete. But in this case it caught my eye.

[sweetorsavory]

I normally glance at the headlines, check to see if any prof I remember has gotten a teaching award or a grant, and read the alumni notes for the few years around mine to see if anyone I know has gotten married or had a kid.

[lingboy]

It's text-based, but when you do the lessons, they pronounce words for you. There is no production analysis of the user, unfortunately, but this really doesn't exist for any language in any automatic sort of way. We have enough trouble designing automatic speech recognizers, let alone software that will evaluate goodness of a pronunciation or whether or not your vowel was rounded. That's still some years off (several I think).