Three new Falcon models can understand Emirati speech, transcribe multiple languages and read Arabic documents and images
Abu Dhabi is putting Emirati Arabic at the heart of AI with the launch of three new models designed to better understand how people in the UAE speak and communicate.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has unveiled Falcon-Emirati, Falcon-ASR and Falcon-OCR-Arabic.
The headline launch is Falcon-Emirati, a 7-billion-parameter model built specifically for Emirati Arabic. It has been trained to understand local vocabulary, expressions, idioms and cultural references, rather than simply processing Modern Standard Arabic.
TII says the model scored 84.83 per cent on Alyah, a benchmark covering everyday Emirati Arabic, heritage knowledge and poetry, outperforming the other Arabic and multilingual open-source models evaluated.
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Also launching is Falcon-ASR, which converts spoken Emirati Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese into written text. It could be used for everything from meeting transcription and subtitles to accessibility tools and voice-enabled services.
Meanwhile, Falcon-OCR-Arabic can extract Arabic text and structured information from images and documents, including tables and mathematical formulas.
Together, the three models expand Abu Dhabi’s Falcon AI family across text, speech and visual content, while strengthening Arabic-language capabilities and supporting the UAE’s push to develop its own sovereign AI technology.
As Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary-General of ATRC, said: “Our language belongs in the future we are building. With Falcon-Emirati, we are putting our knowledge and expertise behind that belief. There is real pride in building technology that understands our people. And there is real freedom in having the capability here in the UAE to develop it further, set our own priorities and turn our ambitions into something people can use.”
A small step for humanity, a big step for AI..
