Our brand has essentially become synonymous with language learning particularly with younger users. So, there’s a lot of moats like that. But I would say the best one is just that we have a product that is more engaging and it’s getting more and more engaging the more users we have because we run more experiments. So that’s kind of our view on it.
Zach Morrissey: Very helpful.
Deborah Belevan: Next question comes from Alex Sklar, Raymond James.
Alex Sklar: Great. Thank you. Luis first for you, this is a bit of a follow-up to Justin’s question and it’s a bit early given you just launched music. But how do you think about the ideal content course footprint within the main app? Is more always better? Is there an optimal level of choice that you found? And as you think about kind of future organic or inorganic content, do you think it will always make sense now to keep it in the one primary app?
Luis von Ahn: I’m not sure I fully understand your question. I mean in terms of more you mean more subjects or more general kind of hours of content. I’m not sure I fully understand.
Alex Sklar: More subjects, more languages or more expansions into things like math or music or et cetera?
Luis von Ahn: Yes. I mean — you’re not going to see us expand in every single subject at least not for the time being. I mean, in fact you’re not going to see us be adding more subjects other than math and music. Maybe we’ll add a few other languages, yes, like foreign languages but you’re not going to see us add other subjects in the short to medium-term. We’re very committed to making math and music succeed. I mean, we haven’t even launched them. So you cannot possibly say they are successful yet in the main app because we haven’t even launched them. So we’re very committed to making them succeed. Our belief is that there are things that make a lot of sense to learn with the Duolingo app. They are usually things that you can learn on your own that take a long time to learn where the thing that you’re learning requires a lot of repetition.
I mean, certainly a lot of the arithmetic and a lot of the parts of math the way you learn them is do a lot of repetition. That’s true for music and that’s also true for languages. So things that require a lot of repetition that take a long time to learn and also that we think will have a very large audience. These are the types of things that we will be adding to the approximately, although for the time being we’re going to stay just with math and music. Yeah, I think that was the only part of your question right?
Alex Sklar: Yeah. No, perfect. Great color there. And then maybe just as a follow-up. In terms of the tracking of at risk paid subscribers. What do you see in the month after you announced math and music in the main app in terms of the usage of that cohort?
Luis von Ahn: Of people who are at risk.
Alex Sklar: Yeah. Perhaps they’re paid subscribers. They’re using it less and kind of did that bring them back…
Luis von Ahn: I actually don’t know the answer to your question. I don’t know if we’ve kept track. My sense is that if there had been a big change, I would have heard about it. So there probably wasn’t a very big change. Although I am answering here, I don’t actually know the answer to your question.
Alex Sklar: All right, great. Thank you.
Deborah Belevan: Next question comes from Andrew Boone of JMP.
Andrew Boone: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Luis, can you provide us an update on Max? And what I really want to also dig in on for this is just anyone that watched OpenAI’s and understood your partnership there. But text-to-speech is just — it feels like it’s coming. And so talk to us about, A, what prevents that from coming to Duolingo? And how does Max start to evolve as just more of these tools become available?
Luis von Ahn: Well, thank you for asking about Max. Okay. So just to provide color about Max. So we announced Max earlier this year. When we announced it, it is a higher tier subscription. So we had Free Duolingo, Super Duolingo and then Max. What we put into Max in this higher tier were two features based on generative AI and in particular OpenAI, generative AI. One was role play and the other one was explain my answer. What we’ve been doing — and when we announced it we said, look, this is a large feature. Usually for large features, it takes us about a year to roll it out to all our users because in that time what we’re doing is we’re giving it to a fraction of our users typically at first a very small fraction of our users.
We improve the feature and then we give it to a larger and larger fraction, et cetera. By now we’re kind of halfway-ish from this. We have we’ve increased the rollout by now a significant fraction of our users on iOS that are learning either French or Spanish have access to Max at least can buy it so we present it to them. And the reason we’ve increased the rollout is because we feel good about the features themselves. We’ve improved both role play and explain my answer to the point where people are using them more, et cetera. So that’s kind of one thing. Another thing that I think is important to mention is, when we announced Max we said, well, we’re putting these AI features in a higher-tier subscription in part because, we have to pay for them.
But we also said, we believe that the cost of using this — or putting these features on our app is actually going to go down, because accessing large language models like open AIs the price is going to go down. And we have already seen that. I mean, this is — the price is actually going down. So what you’re going to see us do over the next few months is — I think it’s important to start talking separately about the fact that we have a three-tier subscription and AI features. Because what you’re going to see us do is, we’re probably going to be shuffling features to see — and experimenting each time of course to see what is the best place to put our features. So it may be the case that, explain my answer goes into Super, as opposed to Max.
And then we take some features from Super and put them into Max. So you’re going to see us do that. And the idea is really to maximize the revenue that we can make and also to maximize the amount of features that we give to our users or value that we give to our users in a three-tier strategy without necessarily saying well the highest tier is AI. On the other side, for AI, we’re going to continue developing these features because we’re very happy with them. And so that’s kind of what we’re going to see. We don’t have anything to say specifically yet about how much contribution that the three-tier system is going to have for example for 2024 bookings, because we’re — there’s just a lot of stuff — there are a lot of moving parts. But we knew this that when we introduced the three-tier to system it was going to take us a while to figure this out.
