Abu Dhabi:UAE-developed artificial intelligence models are enhancing national capabilities through advanced technologies aimed at understanding Emirati Arabic, processing documents, and supporting digital services across key sectors.
According to Emirates News Agency, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), is propelling these technologies via its Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science Research Centre. Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher at the centre, highlighted the Falcon family of AI models, showcasing how advanced and efficient artificial intelligence can be developed without extensive computing resources.
Dr. Hacid identified three key innovations Falcon-Emirati, Falcon-ASR, and Falcon-OCR-Arabic. These models are designed to enhance AI capabilities in local language understanding, speech recognition, and document processing. Falcon-Emirati, built on Falcon-H1-Arabic, achieved a score of 84.83% on the Alyah benchmark, excelling in understanding Emirati Arabic, everyday expressions, heritage knowledge, and poetry, surpassing other Arabic and multilingual open-source models.
Falcon-ASR uses automatic speech recognition to convert multilingual speech into text, while Falcon-OCR-Arabic employs optical character recognition to extract Arabic text and structured information from images and documents. These technologies are poised to support sectors such as healthcare, education, and government services, enabling communication in local dialects and facilitating clinical documentation and multilingual patient communication.
Dr. Hacid also stressed the importance of developing national research talent, sharing AI models and research findings, and strengthening partnerships with universities and technology companies to foster innovation. He noted TII's collaboration with NVIDIA, resulting in the establishment of the Middle East's first joint AI and robotics research laboratory, focusing on next-generation AI models, robotics platforms, and humanoid robotics technologies.
These initiatives align with the UAE's efforts to fortify its status as a global hub for research, development, and technological innovation, while promoting a knowledge-based economy and sustainable development.