AI chatbot 'Ruuh' changing handloom weavers' lives in India: Nadella

'Ruuh' has been built entirely by the research team in India.

"What's incredible is that the team discovered how 'Ruuh' can help handloom weavers in rural communities create new economic opportunity by generating design patterns, inputting pictures and colours with the help of neural networks," Nadella wrote on LinkedIn in a post titled "The people and projects that inspired me in 2017" late on Thursday.

By creating new designs, said Nadella, "they're able to grow their markets and generate new revenue, helping to preserve this ancient art form and carry on a family business that spans generations".

Not just 'Ruuh,' social chatbots built by Microsoft have over 100 million users with 30 billion conversation sessions across five countries.

"Three years ago in China, our team built and introduced our first social chatbot called Xiaoice, which has the ability to chat in natural language, as well as create content ranging from art to poetry," Nadella wrote.

According to him, the stories of Microsoft teams and employees illustrate the intersection of personal passion in areas like health care, accessibility and education with new technologies - the Cloud, AI, Mixed Reality (MR) and quantum computing.

"An amazing collaboration - called Project Premonition - between Microsoft researcher Ethan Jackson, a team from Microsoft Research, the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University, University of California Riverside, and Vanderbilt University is utilizing the Microsoft Cloud and our AI platform to detect pathogens before they cause outbreaks." Their work turns the pesky-yet-dangerous mosquito into a powerful data source that detects the emergence of disease pathogens before they have a chance to infect others.