Your next question was about text-to-speech which is basically Speech-to-Text from OpenAI. We have our own speech to text. We’re very happy because we made our voices for our own characters. So for now we’re probably going to continue with it, because each one of our characters has its own voice et cetera. Overtime if we see that OpenAI Speech-to-Text is very good of course, we may evaluate it.
Andrew Boone: I’ll use my follow-up to follow-up on that. In terms of just their capabilities though right like you clearly see somebody else that is now become a conversational in terms of language. And so how do we port that progress back to Duolingo?
Luis von Ahn: Sorry, I’m not quite sure, I understand.
Andrew Boone: Within ChatGPT, it feels like it’s becoming more conversations you use it call it like the premium tiers, right? And so the question is, how do we think about language learning starting to become conversational and really more advanced in terms of one-on-one tutoring.
Luis von Ahn: Oh, yeah. We are definitely working on features that are related to that. You will see us — you will see — I mean, I don’t have anything specific to announce, but we are definitely working on features that will feel a lot more like that and you’ll see us in the next few months start experimenting with them.
Andrew Boone: All right. Thank you.
Deborah Belevan: All right. Thanks Andrew. And the next question comes from Arvind Ramnani at Piper with an awesome Zoom background.
Luis von Ahn: Love it.
Arvind Ramnani: Thanks. I had to kind of compete with Justin, right? But — so I guess, my first question is you have these very, creative intros when you open up your prepared remarks. At what point do you take the group of analysts out here and you convert this into whole radio? We’ve been showing up for our conference calls. As Megan Markle, last quarter when do we get our time?
Matthew Skaruppa: We’re working on it, Arvind.
Luis von Ahn: Arvind, do you want to be in one of our TikToks is that what you’re saying?
Arvind Ramnani: Yeah. Yeah. That’s why I ask. Anyway about …
Matthew Skaruppa: Bette than or half Arvind.
Arvind Ramnani: Perfect. So I wanted to ask about your product development road map, right? Like there are many ways you can go. You have – you take your core language and you come up with Duolingo Max, do you have a radio and you have that kind of enhancing the core sort of language. And then of course like math and music is another very interesting vector. How are you sort of like making the choices between like product enhancements on your core versus kind of expansion?
Luis von Ahn: Yes, an excellent question. The majority of the effort is going into the core. We believe the – language learning is a very big business that we are only scratching the surface on and that is where we are the category leaders. We are not yet the category leaders for math or music education. We are the category leader for our language education. So we’re spending the majority of effort on that. That said, what’s nice about putting math and music into the main app is that a lot of the changes that we make to improve the core immediately helped math and music. So for example, we may make a change to make the leaderboards more exciting. Well, math and music are already in the app. So it will immediately go into math and music.
So most of the effort goes into the core but some of that goes into math and music. And then just to give you an idea, math and music I mean, the total number of people working on math and music is like 50, which is a small fraction of our whole product team. So that’s just to give you an idea.
Arvind Ramnani: And I guess are there any gating factors in terms of kind of investing? Is it like you’re trying to balance like profitability kind of Matt’s kind of keeping the purse strings a bit tight to kind of say like let’s get probability. And is it – or is it more like the people like what’s the gating factor that will allow you to kind of push on both.
Luis von Ahn: Yes, it’s a great question, Arvind. The truth of the matter is that the gating factor is I don’t know why. I cannot explain this but the gating factor for any kind of product development ends up being time is this funny thing, where it takes like two years to make a good product. I’ve never been able to see something goes faster. And it doesn’t help if you throw a ton of people into it because they just kind of step on each other’s toes. The right way I think to grow a product is to start with a small and when the product is gaining traction you put more and more people. That is the right way to grow a product. And so we’re not – it’s interesting I mean we really do, we have increased profitability quite a bit.
But in the day-to-day conversations we don’t find ourselves being like “Oh my God I shall have 30 more people to throw at this problem.” I mean it’s more just getting our app together on really what it means to scale the content for math, what exactly do we want to teach for math next and usually throwing more people at this just has not helped us in the past. So the gating factor is just it’s kind of like it has to be a certain time in the oven. It’s like you can’t cook a cake much faster or bigger cake much faster. That’s it.
Arvind Ramnani: Terrific. That’s really helpful and phenomenal results this year. Thank you.
Deborah Belevan: Next question comes from Mark Mahaney at Evercore.
Mark Mahaney: Thanks. Two questions, please. First, I know you’ve had a lot of questions on math and music. So maybe something a little bit more niche. There was some news article about chess and then just made us think about there’s – what about skilled games – games skill categories like that like long-term is that – is there an interesting appeal to – including those somehow in the app? And then secondly, this bookings growth and the MAU and the sub growth is super impressive. But could you give us some color on where these new MAUs these kind of almost record levels of MAUs and match record levels of new subs where they’re coming from? Is this – are you just getting a flood of new people coming in from China or from India? Just help us realize, what the source of these new subs and MAUs is particularly from a geographic perspective? Thank you.
