Duolingo adds AI-powered chatbots to help you learn languages

Can bots make learning a new language easier? Duolingo is about to find out.

The language learning startup updated its app Thursday with a new feature that uses chatbots to help its users practice conversations.

The feature only works for Spanish, French and German for now but the company is planning on adding more languages soon. (Up next are Italian and Portuguese, as well as English, for Spanish and Portuguese speakers.) 

Start a conversation and the bot, which has a few different "personalities," will guide you through a text conversation around a particular subject. If you get stuck, the app suggests responses. And when you make a mistake the app will correct you. The conversations start out simple but get steadily more complex as you go along. The bots themselves are surprisingly adept at handling different types of conversations, responding differently to different variations for any given chat. Read more...