The last two decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first century witnessed the golden age of the development of software linked to the Arabic language by Arab companies.

During this period, desktop publishing software, spelling and grammar checking, converting spoken Arabic speech to text and vice versa, automatic letter reader (OCR), voice spelling, search engines, and translation from and into Arabic appeared.

This was accompanied by the emergence of large and promising Arab portals on the Internet, such as "Arabia Online", "Al-Shabaka Al-Arabiya" and "Ajeeb", all of which later disappeared.

Arabic spelling and grammar checkers

The eighties and nineties of the last century witnessed the development and launch of many Arabic spelling and grammar checkers, the most prominent of which was the Arab Information Systems Company founded by Aladdin Salah Al-Ajmawi in 1982, which developed a spell checker for Macintosh devices, and "Sakhr" for computer programs founded by Muhammad Al-Sharekh in 1982, which developed a spell checker for devices running the Dos system and then Windows, and the Egyptian company Coltech, which was founded by Dr. Taghreed Al-Sayed Anbar in 1990 to develop Arabic language techniques, and developed a spell checker for the Windows system.

The Arab companies that developed these linguistic techniques were unable to reach major international companies, with the exception of the latter, which succeeded in selling its Arabic spelling checker to Microsoft in 1997, where it was merged with the Office 97 crew, and then attached it to the Arabic grammar checker within the Office 2000 crew. But Microsoft stopped dealing with Coltech during the second decade of the twenty-first century, and established its own team to follow up on the work on Arab proofreaders of spelling and grammar.

Arab companies developing a number of proofreaders could not reach major international companies (Shutterstock)

Arabic Search Engines

Many Arab companies have developed search engines for the Internet, including the "Ayn" engine, which was launched in 1997 and closed in 2012, "Al-Arabi", which was launched in 2006 and closed in 2009, and "Anksh", which was launched in 2007 and closed in 2010.

These experiments could not compete with global search engines, especially Google, which was launched in 1998 and began to support the Arabic language in 2002.

Sakhr Company developed the search engine "Al-Idrissi", which was used by many companies and some websites, and despite its quality in processing the Arabic language, it did not move to turn into a comprehensive search engine for the Internet, as the quality of language processing is not enough for success, as searching the Internet requires many other techniques, such as the crawler (Crawler) who roams all the Internet pages, which are estimated to number billions, indexes them, recognizes the corrupt ones and avoids them, recognizes the language of each page, recognizes the limits of texts and articles and extracts them, and recognizes The name of the author, and recognizes the images, their boundaries and titles.

Another key technology required by the search engine is the ranking of search results as best as possible, which includes dozens of variables, which made Google's first search engine globally shortly after its launch.

Developing a web search engine also requires significant investment. Google, for example, received $25 million in funding less than a year after its launch, and the following year it received an additional $25 million through private venture investors, which was unfortunately not available in Arab countries.

Arab government agencies were supposed to support and contribute to financing one of the Arab search engines that was created so that it grows and can carve out a good share of the market associated with online search in Arabic at least. China's Baidu search engine launched in 2000 would not have been the biggest success it had without government support and millions of dollars. The same applies to the Russian search engine "Yandex".

The second decade of the 21st century saw the transition of the development of Arabic language technologies from Arab companies to international companies (Wikipedia)

Arabic translation

In 2000, ATA launched the www.almisbar.com probe site to translate texts and websites from English to Arabic. In the same year, Sakhr launched its English-to-Arabic (Tarjim.com) translation website. Both sites were promising until Google ended the golden age of Arabic translation software in April 2005, after the newly developed Google Translate statistical program outperformed Sakhr Translate and other translation programs in tests conducted by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Google used the huge amount of content it collected through the search engine to develop a statistical translation engine from English to Arabic and vice versa, which was impossible for Arab companies, due to their lack of this amount of content.

Several international companies were later able to develop translation engines from English to Arabic and vice versa, led by Microsoft because they have as much content as Google's.

The second decade of the 21st century witnessed the transition of the development of many widely used Arabic language techniques from Arab companies to international companies that adopted the development of these techniques with the help of Arab experts. Not only the technologies we have previously discussed, but also Arabic voice recognition, automatic voice dictation, automatic reading of comic letters, and the conversion of spoken Arabic speech into text and vice versa.

Do Arab countries still have the opportunity to work on developing Arabic language technologies?

The answer is yes. In September 2022, the EU launched a project to create a European web search engine (OpenWebSearch.eu). The stated reason for this project is concerns arising from an imbalance in the search engine market, which is dominated by several companies such as Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and Yandex, and thus controls Internet content, threatening content democracy and limiting European innovative possibilities.

The need to develop Arabic language technologies is greater than the European need, but it requires the establishment of a specialized Arab center, supported by several Arab countries, especially the rich ones, that uses the huge amount of Arabic content currently available, to devise new and effective ways to address the complex issues of the Arabic language, including Arabic music and Arabic language fonts.