English learning app or an AI agent in Telegram: one lesson, Duolingo and Babbel next to a real chat

The short answer

An English learning app gives you a course. Duolingo and Babbel have a path of short lessons, built by their teams, with a streak or a review plan to bring you back each day. Duolingo is free to start, and both have paid plans for more practice.

An AI agent in Telegram gives you a lesson about your own day. You tell it who you are and what you need English for, and it writes the phrases, checks your sentences line by line, plays the guest, the client or the interviewer, and answers your voice notes. It is free to start, and Pro is $13.90 a month.

• Duolingo: you want a free daily habit, a game with a streak and a course that decides what comes next. Max adds Video Call with Lily, a character from the app.
• Babbel: you want a structured course with grammar explained and speech recognition, paid once a year or once for life.
• WAM Agents: you need English for a real situation, at work or on a trip, and you want every mistake explained, a role-play partner and voice practice in the messenger you already use.

WAM Agents is set up to your lessons. Phrases, corrections, role-play, voice notes both ways and a one-off quiz reminder work from the first message on Free. On Pro the agent also repeats reminders and runs lessons on a schedule, for example a quiz every weekday at eight. The agent starts in Telegram and can connect to other messengers.

Duolingo starts free, Babbel sells a year, WAM charges by the work

Prices read on 30 October 2026. Duolingo’s Super page lists the plans and the free trial, and the app shows the price for your country when you start it. Babbel’s page showed euro prices on our visit, with a 20% Lifetime promo code running. WAM Agents Pro is $13.90 a month, and $1.39 for the first month if you subscribe within your first 7 days.

An app trains the course, the agent trains your situation

This table is built from Duolingo’s and Babbel’s own pages and from WAM’s pricing page, all read on 30 October 2026, plus the lesson below. The apps are strongest at a long course that decides what you learn next, and at the small daily game that keeps you on it.

One lesson with our agent: a hotel front desk, 23:16

On 30 October I played Ana, a receptionist at a small hotel in Porto with A2 English, and took one lesson with a WAM agent our team works with, on the default model. I asked for it the way an app would run it: phrases, an exercise, then speaking. Replies are quoted as sent and shortened where they ran long. Times are the agent’s local time.

The lesson: five phrases for a late check-in

An app lesson is built for everyone on the same unit. This one used my three situations from the message: late check-in, directions, complaints. Each phrase came with the reason it works on a guest: “May I” for someone you just met, a time with every delay, sorry before the explanation. The exercise uses the same scene, and the word bank gives an A2 learner something to lean on.

Corrections: four mistakes, four rules

I made four typical A2 mistakes on purpose: “the reservation”, “not ready still”, “can I to help” and “luggages”. The agent found all four and gave each one a rule short enough to remember: first mention takes “a”, after “can” there is never “to”, “luggage” has no plural. It also caught a fifth thing nobody marks in an exercise: “in twenty minutes” is a promise you might break at a front desk, “about twenty minutes” is safer.

This is the part apps keep short. A wrong answer in an exercise is marked wrong and shown right; here each mistake comes with the reason, in the context of the sentence you wrote.

The role-play: a guest who doesn’t calm down

One line at a time, as asked, and the guest doesn’t give up after a good answer. He accepts the coffee, then brings two new things to handle: a call at seven and the Wi-Fi password. That is how a real check-in goes, and the part a fixed exercise leaves out: the next line depends on what you just said.

Speaking: a voice note and the one fix that matters

In the voice note I said, in 17 seconds: “Of course, I understand you are tired. I am very sorry for this. While you wait, I can to give you a free coffee in our bar, and tomorrow the breakfast is free for you. Your room is ready in fifteen minutes, I promise.” The agent stayed in the role first, and the guest went straight to the directions from phrase 4 of the lesson. Then it stepped out and picked the fix that changes the meaning, “is ready” for “will be ready”.

The best line is the second fix. “I can to give” is the same slip as “Can I to help” two minutes earlier, and the agent connected them: a habit, not a gap in knowledge. An exercise checks one answer; the agent remembers the whole lesson.

Listening: the right version, read slowly

The 12-second voice message came right after the text. The agent rewrote my answer as seven short sentences, one idea per breath, and listed the three changes. The last line is the method in one sentence: listen once, then say it back in your own voice.

A quiz that arrives on its own

At 23:24 the agent wrote first, nobody asked again. The three questions are my own weak spots from the lesson: the word after “can”, the future for a promise, the directions. This is the repetition an app builds into its review, made from your own mistakes. One-off reminders like this work on Free; on Pro the agent repeats them, for example a quiz every weekday morning before your shift.

Before you rely on a rule the agent gives you, ask for two more examples with it. If the examples feel natural, the rule is yours.

Duolingo and Babbel: what their pages and reviewers say

We didn’t run the apps for this article. Everything below comes from Duolingo’s and Babbel’s own pages, read on 30 October 2026, and from one hands-on account, with links.

Duolingo’s free plan gives the whole course: the path of short lessons and the streak. On the Super page the paid plan adds unlimited hearts, no ads, personalised practice and a mistakes review, with a one-week free trial; Super Family covers up to six accounts. The page doesn’t list a price, the app shows it when you start the trial.

Energy. In July 2025 Duolingo began testing Energy in place of hearts: each lesson uses a little, a run of correct answers earns some back, and the battery recharges in about a day, or sooner with an ad or gems. Duolingo said it was “only available to a small number of users”.

Duolingo Max and Video Call. Max is the tier above Super. Its Video Call puts you on a call with Lily, a character from the app, and it is open to Max subscribers learning English, among other courses. Early in the course a call lasts about a minute; later “your conversations with Lily could last up to 3 minutes”. You can ask Lily to repeat or slow down.

What a heavy user says. Imogen West-Knights wrote in The Dial about years of Swedish on Duolingo: “All those hours on Duolingo had given me a huge vocabulary but left me more or less mute.” On a call with Lily she “felt embarrassed in front of the robot”. That is Swedish, not English, and one learner, and it names the gap this lesson goes after: words grow faster than speaking.

Babbel teaches 14 languages with short lessons built by language experts. Its home page lists speech recognition for pronunciation and conversations with an AI partner, and the first lesson of every course is free. On the prices page on 30 October a 12-month plan was €7.99 a month, €95.88 billed once a year, and Lifetime was €299.99 as a one-time payment.

Use both: the app for the habit, the agent for the job

You don’t have to pick one for life. An app is good at the first months: the alphabet of a language, a few hundred words, a reason to open it every day. The agent is good at the moment you need English for something specific: a shift at reception, a client call, a trip next week.

A simple split that works: ten minutes of the app in the morning for the streak, and one message to the agent when real life brings a situation. “Tomorrow I have a guest who complained about noise, give me the phrases and play him” takes a minute to send. If speaking is what you need most, the guide Speaking practice with AI: a 10-minute voice routine in Telegram builds a daily voice routine, and Learn English with AI: a month-long plan with words, grammar, voice and weekly checks turns lessons like this one into a month.

Which one to choose

Choose Duolingo if you are starting from zero, want a free course that decides what comes next and enjoy keeping a streak. Choose Super or Max if you want it without ads and hearts, and on Max, short video calls with Lily.

Choose Babbel if you want a structured course with grammar explained, made by language experts, and prefer to pay once a year or once for life.

Choose WAM Agents if you need English for your own situation, want every mistake explained and a partner for role-play and voice practice, and want it in the messenger you already use. It is ready in about a minute: pick a name and an avatar in the bot. The same agent also translates menus, voice notes and PDFs, see AI translator in Telegram: a menu photo, a voice note and a PDF, translated in one chat, and more head-to-heads are in WAM Agents vs ChatGPT.

What the lesson cost

We read the balance in the agent’s status line after each reply. The lesson took 4  and the corrections 4 . The four role-play lines came to about 1 . My voice note and the feedback took 2 , the spoken reply 3 , the quiz with its reminder 3 . About 17  for the whole lesson, out of the 200  the Free plan gives in the first month.

The published rates put a minute of voice transcription at 1 , a spoken reply of 1,000 characters from 4  and 20,000 tokens of text at 1 . Duolingo and Babbel charge for the plan, not for each lesson: the free course or trial first, then a subscription.

Create your agent, give it a name and an avatar, and send it the first lesson from the list above.