About

Dilo is an independent project, built in the open. No growth team, no founder story. The brand speaks as the product, and the product is judged on one number: how long it takes an adult with zero Spanish to hold a real conversation.

How the research was done

Before any design, we read what the institutions that train adults fastest say about themselves, in their own documents rather than in blog summaries:

• The Foreign Service Institute's published language training guidance and its internal lessons on what makes learners succeed (Jackson and Kaplan, 1999), including the finding that its programs cannot be shortened.
• Peace Corps Office of Inspector General audits of language training, which report how many trainees in a cohort reached Intermediate-Mid on the oral interview before swear-in.
• Defense Language Institute studies, including its own evaluation of an internal immersion program that, after controlling for who was selected, did not improve test scores.
• The second-language acquisition literature on output, explicit instruction, spacing and task-based teaching, including the Bryfonski and McKay meta-analysis of task-based learning.
• Davies' 20-million-word corpus of Spanish, which gives the coverage figures behind the vocabulary targets.
• Duolingo's own randomised trial of its speaking feature, and the coded complaints in one-to-three-star reviews of the AI speaking apps on the market.

Every claim on this site carries its number and its source. Where we have not measured something ourselves, we say so.

What we will publish

• The research behind the method is already published: the research page names the evidence behind each part of the loop and marks where Dilo made its own choice. The competitor review analysis is not published yet.
• The blind-rating protocol for feedback accuracy, before there is anything to rate, and the agreement rate against a human tutor when it lands.
• The beta cohort's aggregate result on the day-one and exit oral check.
• The north-star metric: time to a first unscripted three-minute conversation.

What Dilo is not

Not fluent in 30 days. Not a habit game. There are no hearts, no XP, no leaderboards, no word banks. Latin American Spanish, iOS first, a closed beta of about 100 people at levels 1 and 2.

Questions go to any email we send you. Every reply is read.