If You’re Ignoring Your Duolingo Notifications, This Desktop Owl Can Help

Top scientists have confirmed that if you attempted to learn a new language any time in the last decade, there is a 100% chance that you tried Duolingo. Anyone who didn’t is a rounding error at this point. But though Duolingo makes language learning an accessible and pleasant task, we all struggle to complete our lessons on a daily basis. The reminders from Duolingo get disregarded with the flood of other notifications we get on our smartphones, which is why Miloš Rašić built this desktop Duolingo owl that can’t be ignored.

Learning and retaining a new language is all about repetition and daily use. Skip your German lessons for just a couple of weeks and you won’t remember if “apfel” actually means “apple” or if that is just some silly nonsense you made up. The Duolingo app recognizes that, which is why it sends surprisingly persistent and aggressive reminder notifications — notifications that everyone clears without a second glance. This desktop owl, on the other hand, perches atop a computer monitor and if you skip lessons, it will stare at you with contemptuous eyes and make displeased noises at you. That’s impossible to tune out and learning ensues.

The emerald raptor has a 3D-printed body, for which Rašić found a 3D model online. He modified that to fit the electronic components. The most visible of those components is a Waveshare 0.71” DualEye LCD module, which has a pair of round LCDs in an eyeball-like arrangement. An ESP32-C6 development board controls those LCD eyes, as well as the DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 that plays angry bird sound effects. The sound effects and eyeball graphics change based on the progress — or lack thereof — that Rašić makes on his lessons for the day. The owl gets very upset if he grows neglectful.

The code, programmed through the Arduino IDE, is pretty straightforward. The only noteworthy part of it is the fetching of progress data from Duolingo. There isn’t any official Duolingo API for the public to access, but enterprising users have reverse-engineered a lot of what happens behind the scenes and Rašić was able to use that information to gather simple lesson and progress status updates.

Now Rašić will never miss another Duolingo session, lest he draw the bird’s ire.