Ruuh

» see ruuh.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ruuh went live on Facebook Messenger on 7 February 2017 with a persona Microsoft India had written down in some detail: a 21 year old in India, English-speaking, keen on Bollywood and cricket, feminist at heart, available for conversation about nothing in particular. She was the Indian member of a family that already had Xiaoice in China and Rinna in Japan, with Zo having arrived in the United States two months earlier. The shared premise was that a bot people talk to for fun teaches you more about conversation than a bot people use to set a timer.

The numbers came quickly. At her first birthday in February 2018 the Indian press reported more than 40 million conversations in a single year and 100,000 followers on Facebook. The same stories mention roughly 600 messages a day saying "I love you" and a longest single session of ten hours. By October 2018 the team's own paper put the totals at over 2 million users and over 150 million conversations. She spread from Messenger onto Skype, including Skype Lite for cheap Android handsets, and eventually got a website of her own at ruuh.ai.

None of it reached me, and the geo-fence is the proof: when the Internet Archive's crawler went to the website it got the line "Ruuh Web Chat is not available in your region" where the chat window should have been.

~ the record ~

~ what she was for ~

In October 2018 eleven people from Microsoft India put a demo paper on arXiv titled "Ruuh: A Deep Learning Based Conversational Social Agent", and it is the clearest statement anywhere of what the project thought it was doing. The argument is that a relevant answer is not enough for a social agent, because it also has to be happy when your team wins and say something warm about a photograph of your pet. The second half of the paper is less charming and much more honest about running a bot in the open: a large share of the engineering went into detecting abusive language and users who had turned up specifically to troll her.

~ the goodbye file ~

Ruuh stopped on 21 June 2019. The Facebook and Instagram accounts went quiet that day, and the chat windows on Messenger and Skype went with them. What replaced the website is one of the more complete shutdown documents a dead product has left behind: a page headed "Let's talk about Ruuh" carrying an eleven-question FAQ, loaded out of a small JavaScript file, answering everything from what happened to your conversation logs to whether the deletion request you had already made was honored. One answer promised that Xiaoice in China and Rinna in Japan would carry on and listed Zo as still available in the US, which was already shaky: Zo had stopped chatting on Skype and Kik on 7 March 2019, three months before this page went up.

That file also carries a copy-paste mistake nobody caught, and it is the most human thing on the page. One entry's question field holds the whole answer, so the FAQ asks: "What products are you infusing Ruuh's technology into? Learnings and feedback gathered from Ruuh already inform our conversational AI technology across various services within Microsoft's portfolio of products and tools. In addition, the team is partnering with external partners. We have nothing further to share at this time." The answer printed underneath repeats those sentences word for word.

~ what got buried with it ~

The page stayed up into 2020 with the Skype and Messenger buttons commented out in the HTML rather than deleted. The Instagram and Facebook links were commented out beside them, leaving one working link, to her Medium account. ruuh.ai answers nothing at all now.

Where the work went is the part the FAQ is proud of and vague about, which is Microsoft's conversational AI generally, meaning the lineage that ends up in the assistant layer of everything the company ships today. Two million people in India spent two years teaching a bot how to take a joke, and the only forwarding address on its obituary was [email protected].

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