We've made a run of releases in the open-source repo. Rather than list commits, here's what actually changed for the people using Rumi: six more languages, a ready-made library of 890 lessons with quizzes, and a way to start using Rumi today without waiting on anyone's approval.
Most of what we build comes from the same complaint, said four different ways: teachers want help in the language they think in, they want material they can use tomorrow morning, and they want it without a procurement cycle in front of it.
These three releases answer those in order. If you run a school network, a teacher-training programme or an education non-profit, this page is the short version of what that means for your people. The engineering detail is at the bottom, and everything is linked to the repo.
Hindi · Bengali · Marathi · Telugu · Tamil · Kannada
Rumi already worked in nine languages, most of them South Asian and Middle Eastern. It now also works in six Indian languages — and "works" means the whole experience, not a translated interface. A teacher can send a voice note in Marathi, get a spoken reply in Marathi, ask for a lesson plan and receive one written for an Indian classroom, with rupees in the word problems and names her students recognise.
There's nothing to configure. Rumi recognises the script and the language and answers in it from the first message — including code-mixed messages, which is how most people actually write.
Speech is transcribed in-language and the reply comes back as a voice note in the same language, so a teacher walking between classes never has to type.
Useful where typing in a Brahmic script is slower than speaking.
Send /language and pick from a short list — the list is filtered to your country, so an Indian teacher sees the Indian set rather than scrolling past twelve options.
The change, in full — six languages, 1,382 tests passing.
A few weeks before the platform release, we opened something we'd been sitting on: the complete Taleemabad content library. Six years of work behind the Taleemabad Student App — hand-written questions, hand-drawn illustrations, studio-recorded voice clips — matched to the national curriculum, checked question by question, and rebuilt to be delivered over WhatsApp.
It ships with Rumi. There's no licence to negotiate and no media to host.
Nursery to Grade 6, English and Urdu, Pakistani national curriculum. 858 of the videos have a quiz attached.
Send /video, then tap through grade, subject and topic. The video arrives in the chat.
Fifteen questions, each with feedback written for the wrong answer as well as the right one. Younger grades get picture questions to tap and phonics read aloud as voice notes.
The teacher forwards a single link; every child plays it one-to-one on a parent's phone. No accounts, no app.
A PDF naming exactly which children missed which concept, so the first ten minutes of class can be spent on the right thing.
For education organisations: this is the cheapest way to give a network of low-resource classrooms real digital content — no devices per child, no bandwidth for a video platform, no content budget. The library is region-gated to Pakistan by default because the corpus follows that curriculum; other regions switch it on when they bring their own material, and we can help map yours.
Until this release, trying Rumi meant applying for a WhatsApp Business account and waiting for Meta to approve it. For a school district evaluating three tools, that's a week gone before anyone sees a single lesson plan.
Now the messaging side is interchangeable. The default option links an ordinary WhatsApp number — the same way WhatsApp Web does, by scanning a code — and Rumi answers on it immediately. When the pilot becomes a programme, one command moves everything to an official business number, and every teacher, conversation and past assessment comes with it.
One command sets up everything Rumi needs on a laptop or a server.
Setup is a guided conversation in ordinary language — "where should Rumi keep its memory?", not a variable name. Each answer is checked against the real service as it's entered, so a wrong paste is caught in the moment rather than surfacing as a mystery a week later.
? Where should Rumi keep its memory (teachers, lessons, reports)? Paste your project URL: https://xxxx.•••••••.co Paste the access key: eyJhbGciOi•••••••• ✓ Connected. 14 tables found. Saved.
A code appears; open WhatsApp on the phone whose number Rumi should answer as, go to Linked devices, and scan it. That's the pairing done, and it survives restarts.
Rumi introduces itself, asks what you teach, and you're in the same conversation thousands of teachers use every week. About fifteen minutes, start to finish.
One command moves you to an official WhatsApp Business number with nothing lost — Rumi knows people by their phone number, not by how the message arrived.
Features that depend on Meta's tappable forms don't vanish on an ordinary number — they turn into a numbered list in the chat. Settings, videos, reading assessments and class setup all still work; they just look plainer.
What it looks like from the teacher's side.
rumi-explainer · 0:52
npm run setup now launches the wizard (the old preflight is npm run doctor), .env is read from the repo root, and required variables are core-only with channel variables alongside. Existing Meta deployments need no change.Message the hosted Rumi to see it finished, clone the repo and pair your own number, or talk to us about running it for your schools.