TII Unveils Falcon-Emirati and Advanced Arabic AI Models
The Technology Innovation Institute has launched three groundbreaking artificial intelligence models designed to advance Emirati language and culture, bringing sophisticated language processing capabilities to developers and users across the region.
The Technology Innovation Institute, the applied research division of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, has unveiled three innovative artificial intelligence models that represent a significant advancement in computational understanding of Emirati language and culture.
Falcon-Emirati, a seven-billion-parameter language model, has been purpose-built to comprehend and interact with Emirati Arabic. The model captures the distinctive vocabulary, expressions, idioms and cultural context that characterise the dialect, enabling technology to engage more naturally with speakers of the UAE’s local language.
Complementing this offering are two additional models. Falcon-ASR, an automatic speech recognition system with 1.6 billion parameters, converts spoken Standard and Emirati Arabic alongside English, French, Spanish and Portuguese into written text. Falcon-OCR-Arabic, an optical character recognition model, extracts Arabic text and structured content from images and documents with notable efficiency.
Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to the UAE President for Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs and Secretary-General of ATRC, emphasised the cultural significance of the development. “Our language belongs in the future we are building,” he remarked, highlighting the importance of establishing sovereign AI capabilities within the Emirates that reflect the nation’s priorities and values.
Dr. Najwa Aaraj, Chief Executive Officer of TII, underscored the necessity for artificial intelligence to comprehend authentic communication patterns. “Emirati Arabic carries distinctive expressions, cultural references and ways of communicating,” she noted, explaining how the new models ensure that emerging technologies understand not merely the language itself but how Emirati communities actually employ it.
Falcon-Emirati demonstrated exceptional performance on Alyah, a native Emirati Arabic benchmark encompassing everyday language, figurative expressions, heritage knowledge and poetry, achieving a score of 84.83 per cent and surpassing all other Arabic and multilingual open-source models subjected to evaluation. Despite its comparatively compact size, Falcon-ASR similarly outperformed substantially larger systems in assessing Emirati speech recognition accuracy.
These models unlock numerous practical applications across customer service, transcription, subtitling, accessibility services and voice-enabled digital platforms. The launch represents a continued expansion of TII’s sovereign artificial intelligence capabilities, demonstrating the institution’s commitment to advancing technologies that authentically serve Arabic-speaking communities across the region.
Source: WAM