Abu Dhabi institute launches Emirati Arabic, speech and OCR AI models
The Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi introduced Falcon-Emirati for the local dialect, Falcon-ASR for multilingual speech transcription and Falcon-OCR-Arabic for extracting Arabic text and structure from documents.
Event / data period: 2026-10-06
Published: · Updated:
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, announced three artificial intelligence models on October 6. Falcon-Emirati, with 7 billion parameters, was built to handle the vocabulary, expressions and cultural context of Emirati Arabic. TII said it scored 84.83 percent on Alyah, a benchmark for native Emirati Arabic.
The other releases target different tasks. Falcon-ASR, a 1.6-billion-parameter model, transcribes spoken Emirati and Standard Arabic as well as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Falcon-OCR-Arabic extracts Arabic text and structured content, including tables and mathematical formulas, from images and documents. TII listed these as potential uses and did not publish an independent product evaluation.
Data
Launch of Falcon-Emirati, Falcon-ASR and Falcon-OCR-Arabic
On October 6, TII announced three models for Emirati Arabic, multilingual speech recognition and Arabic text extraction from images.
- Source-reported score on the Alyah benchmark
- 84.83 percent
- 2026-10-06 · Observed
Methodology
The event date is from TII's primary announcement issued that day. The 84.83 percent Alyah score and model sizes are TII-reported claims, not independently measured by Newsverum. Alyah assesses native Emirati Arabic, including everyday language, figurative expressions, heritage and poetry.
Updated:
Subjects and places
Subject proposals
- Artificial intelligenceSuggested
- Subject suggested from the title or summary: AIfalconllm.tii.ae ↗
Geographic references
Only source-provided geographic references are shown. Opening an external map is optional. Optional story maps use OpenStreetMap. Opening a map sends your IP address and this site’s address to the map provider; location data remains readable as text without loading the map.
- United Arab Emirates · Place role: Coverage · Place type: Country or area · Location precision: RegionalEvidence
- Explicit preserved editorial country/region; no city or national centroid inferredfalconllm.tii.ae ↗
- Abu Dhabi · Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · Place role: Place mentioned by source · Place type: City · Location precision: Approximate
54.3860893525, 24.4396362329 (longitude, latitude)
EvidenceOpen this point in OpenStreetMap ↗- Explicit article mention: Abu Dhabi. Country agrees with the preserved article scope. Gazetteer reference only; event location is unconfirmed.falconllm.tii.ae ↗ungegn.un.org ↗ungegn-api.azurewebsites.net ↗