What’s new in Duory?

Hello PH 👋,

It’s been three months since I launched Duory, and I wanted to share a quick update on what’s new in the app — along with a few behind-the-scenes stories for each feature.

Phrase Capture – Let’s you capture phrases from Duolingo (or similar language learning apps) directly or via screenshots, images, or RTF/PDF documents. This helps you reduce context switching when you're in the middle of a lesson — whether it's a sentence in Duolingo or screenshotting a cool phrase you spotted in a YouTube comment thread.

Ironically, this was one of the first features I built — but the app evolved so much over time that I had to completely rebuild it and didn't have enough time to complete it before launch.

Words Widget – This is currently the only widget in the app. It surfaces recently added words from your phrases. You can filter by target language and how often it refreshes.

Why this feature? I've always found Duolingo’s widget a bit too focused on streaks and engagement. I wanted to see recently learned words instead so that’s what I did.

Journaling with Apple Suggestions – Reflect on your day in a language you're learning.

Journaling has always been possible in Duory, but entries didn’t feel much different from regular notes. That’s changed a bit — entries now stand out more with prominent dates, and you can get journaling prompts via Apple’s Journaling Suggestions API.

Calendar View – See your Duory activity day by day.

The here idea was to create a more focused daily mode, instead of browsing your entire notes library which can feel overwhelming. Each new day starts with a clean slate, and you can look back on past days to see what you worked on.

Stickers & Images – For fun and memorable notes.

This was inspired by something I wish Apple Notes had: better support for stickers. I wanted an experience closer to what you’d get in canvas-based apps (e.g., Notability) but within a traditional text editor. In Duory, you can resize, rotate, and move stickers freely. You can even choose whether they wrap with text or float above it.

Localization – Duory is now available in 7 new languages: Hindi, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

I realized there are just as many (probably more) non-English speakers learning English as there are English speakers learning languages like Japanese or Mandarin. So I carved out some time to localize Duory into these regions — and more are on the way!

What’s next for Duory?

There is so much more work to do! I am currently trying to dial back on the features to focus on telling people about Duory. But in the near future, I have some big plans for helping learners get more out of word lists in Duory, bringing Apple Pencil support to the iPad version and finally bringing Duory to MacOS.

It’s taken three months to get here, and it has taken that long for me to finally get a clear idea of what I want Duory to do at it's core: A tool to help language learners save time and stay in the flow when taking notes.

Thanks for reading — and as always, I’d love your feedback!