Can a chatbot teach you a foreign language? Duolingo thinks so

If you want to get something done with a computer, it turns out, there are better ways to do it than laboriously type out conversational sentences to be read by a programme with a shaky grasp of the language and a gratingly affected sense of humour. So I'm as surprised as anyone that for the past week, I've started every morning with a 10 minute conversation with a chatbot. The bot is the creation of Pittsburgh-based language-learning startup Duolingo, and it's the first major change for the company's app since it launched four years ago. In that time, the service has gained 150 million users, and stuck stubbornly to the top of the educational app charts on every platform it's available on. If you haven't used Duolingo, the premise is simple: five to 20 minutes of interactive training a day is enough to learn a language.