The Duolingo Interactive Speaking Task: Innovation in Real-Time Oral Assessment
|Part of the eAA Award Winners 2026 Series
This talk presents the design, implementation, and impact of the Duolingo English Test’s award-winning Interactive Speaking task, the first AI-powered, fully adaptive speaking interview to be operationalized in a large-scale high-stakes assessment without a human examiner.
I’ll begin by outlining the core innovation: a real-time dialogue system that dynamically selects follow-up questions using prompt-specific rubrics, and a scoring system that applies item response theory (IRT) to ensure fairness and comparability across adaptive paths. I will provide an overview of the evidence-based approach we used to design, develop, and validate the task, one that integrates large-scale piloting, psychometric modeling, and iterative expert review.
The second half of the session will highlight several current research projects growing out of this work. These include: (1) enhancing interactivity through clarification and elaboration follow-ups; (2) investigating how linguistic complexity in prompts affects performance across speaking and writing; and (3) ongoing development of a listening comprehension measure based on the interactive speaking task responses.
Together, these innovations and research strands illustrate how AI can not only make assessments more accessible and efficient, but also open new possibilities for what language tests can measure. We hope this session offers a concrete model of how research, technology, and fairness can be integrated in the next generation of language assessment.
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