App Of The Year 2013: Apple Honors Duolingo, A Language-Learning App

Apple has announced the crowd-sourced language-learning app, Duolingo, has been named the company’s pp of the year award for the iPhone. Created by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, the app utilizes games to entice people to learn different languages. The application, Duolingo, launched in 2012 and has grown a big fan base since then. It offers courses in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and English. This has definitely been a well-deserved accolade for the app and its creator.

In October, the company announced the launch of language incubators, which allow users to design new courses for the app. Days after the reveal of the new software the company announced CNN and BuzzFeed contacted the company to contract them to translate articles into French, Spanish and Portuguese. Recently Von Ahn announced the CAPTCHA AND reCAPTCHA software, which help to protect sensitive information by asking users to enter bits of seemingly random text before being allowed to enter a site. This is just one of the many reason Von Ahn is considered a well-regarded entrepreneur.

The app is free for iOS and Android devices and can be downloaded from Apple’s App store or the Google Play store. When you open the app it’s like a game using pictures, your smartphone’s microphone and video clips to help you learn words, recite them and write them out. Von Ahn has big plans for Duolingo in 2014 saying, “We'd like to see 50 languages within the next months.” He also assured people the company will not start charging in 2014. "We're fundamentalists on the belief that we should not charge for language education."