Duolingo has produced its digital Duocon forum since 2019, but virtual events have seen a major overhaul since pre-pandemic times. These days, presentations are shorter, avenues for audience interaction are robust, and content is visually striking. So on Sept. 16, we tuned in to Duocon 2025 to find out how the brand (and pop culture darling) approached this year’s virtual conference.
Highlights of the event included two product reveals, each designed to showcase Duolingo’s evolution from a language learning app into a broader educational platform. One of the features unveiled was a first-of-its-kind integration that, as of Sept. 16, allows LinkedIn users to add their Duolingo scores to their profiles—another step toward the brand’s vision of leveraging user scores to set the global standard for language proficiency. The other announcement was the expansion of Duolingo’s Chess course with an Android launch and a new player-vs-player mode on iOS.
Across speakers, product announcements, attendee interactions and educational content, the experience was compelling and fast-paced. So with an understanding of how Duocon functions from the attendee perspective, we tapped Duolingo’s events director, Katy Romdall, for a quick rundown of how the brand approaches its annual event.
Event Marketer: Why is an all-virtual event the right format for Duocon?
Katy Romdall: As a global company with learners located around the world, a fully virtual format ensures Duocon is equally accessible to everyone. This format reflects our mission of making education universally available and allows us to celebrate our entire community, no matter where they’re learning from.
EM: How do you make the event interactive and accessible?
KR: We stream Duocon on YouTube to remove barriers; anyone can watch without signing up or downloading software. To keep the event accessible, we use YouTube’s built-in tools, like live chat. We’ve tested external chat platforms, but found that centralizing conversation in one place—especially with a global audience speaking dozens of languages—works best. For now, the interactive element lives in YouTube chat, where our social and product teams jump in to answer questions and keep the conversation going.
EM: How are new products/features unveiled during the event?
KR: New features are unveiled on stage by Duolingo executives and product leaders through live demos and keynote segments. The content is visually engaging, fast-paced and helps our community immediately understand what’s new, how it works and what it means for their learning experience.
EM: How do you cater to different countries and time zones?
KR: We time our event to try to accommodate as many time zones as possible. We also review previous viewership metrics to best predict what top languages to consider localizing. All Duocon 2025 segments had subtitles available for viewers in eight different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Korean and Japanese). For anyone who can’t tune in live, the whole event is available to stream on demand immediately afterward.
EM: Which regions does the bulk of the audience hail from?
KR: We typically see people tuning in for the initial broadcast from more than 120 countries, annually. Top viewership, in order of highest views per country, are the U.S., the U.K., India, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico and France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Japan all coming in with near-identical views. These numbers shift slightly in the days and hours after the initial broadcast as people from other time zones catch up.
EM: How do you measure the impact of Duocon, post-event?
KR: We track a variety of success metrics to help us understand the event’s reach, resonance and impact. These include pre-event registrations, event landing page views, live and on-demand viewership, social engagement, in-app promotional engagement, community sentiment, attendee feedback through a post-event survey and earned media coverage.
Photo credit: iStock/.shock (featured); Courtesy of Duolingo
