Ciao 👋

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At long last Duolingo is finally showing some love to it's premium subscription tier, Duolingo Max

it's still only available on IOS devices in specific countries ((more on that here))

but at least now Duolingo is starting to flesh out the features and make them available on more courses

and in the last week, the roll out continued...

what happened?

you may remember that, for a long time, Duolingo Max was only available on Spanish and French

a few weeks ago some of the Max features started rolling out to German, Italian and Portuguese

well, in the last week, it's grown even further

although it hasn't come to any additional courses

the current Max courses have received an additional new feature:

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Video call with Lily 📲

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you may remember I wrote about it a few months ago

for a while it was only available on the French course for Max subscribers

but now it's starting to appear on Spanish, German and Italian as well

you can either hop into a Video call lesson from your learning path,

or start a random one from the practice hub...

my favourite approach at the moment is via the practice hub

i've been playing around with it on the Italian course and each conversation tends to go in different directions

Lily asks you some questions and you just answer them however you like

there's no text, no hand-holding, no nothing

it really is an ordinary, free-flowing conversation...

the cool thing about Video call is it isn't a graded lesson

you can say pretty much whatever you want, make a bunch of grammatical errors, and Lily will usually get the gist of what you're saying and respond accordingly

just like in real life

this isn't so great if you're looking for some constructive feedback ((for this, Roleplay is much better))

but it's a great confidence booster if speaking is a struggle for you

the calls only last a couple of minutes and are worth 30 XP a pop

definitely makes a nice change to the ordinary lessons 👌

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so,

at long last it seems Max is heading in the right direction

I still don't think it's worth the current price point

and Video call with Lily will never be a genuine substitute for talking with a real person

but if Duolingo keeps building on the current features, rolls them out to more courses, and maybe reduces the price a bit, I think Max will finally start to look like a viable subscription 🙌

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what do you think? 🤔 ...

Does Video call with Lily make you want to subscribe to Duolingo Max? Yes No Not sure

Ciao for now,

-Matt

eat 🍽️ sleep 😴 streak 🔥 repeat 🔁

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