A big step for the Arabic Internet

Forty-eight million people in the Arabic world use the Internet, yet the majority of content they view is not written in traditional script. Rather, those with a Western keyboard spell Arabic words phonetically. Professor Rasha Abdullah of the American University in Cairo expressed concern:

The Arabic content on the Internet now is less than 1 percent. And it's obviously very dismal."

Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon.

"I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."

Haddad was inspired to develop the solution: Yamli, a word that derives from yoom-li, meaning 'to dictate'. Co-developer Imad Jureidini explains how it works:

"The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your worsd out phonetically...For example... when you're writing the word 'falafel', Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."

...[Jureidini] says in addition to providing the ability for native Arabic speakers to search and write in their own language, Yamli can also be used to teach Arabic to non-Arabic speakers."

 Since its release last year, Yamli has helped increase Arabic Web content simply by its being used. Check it out here.