Approximately 60% of Arabic-speaking Internet users dislike using an Arabic keyboard, according to Yamli, a Massachusetts-based startup that launched last year. CEO Habib Haddad explains that many users have to use a Latin keyboard for their jobs or school, which makes the keyboards impractical (and many think they’re just hard to type with). When it comes time to type in Arabic, many Internet users have adopted a phonetic web language that spells out Arabic words with these Latin letters. The result, Haddad says, is messy – especially when it comes to making sounds that don’t exist in English.
Yamli has built a system that solves this problem. Users enter words phonetically into a special text box that displays a list of matching words that are written in Arabic. This allows them to keep using their Latin keyboard, without having the resulting text look like gibberish. Because there are around 22 dialects in the Arab world, Yamli has to deal with multiple different phonetic spellings, which Haddad says it does with around 95% accuracy.
The company launched an Arabic frontend to Google in November 2007, and released an API in March 2008. The system was recently integrated into popular Arabic portal Maktoob (which Haddad likens to an Arab Yahoo). In the future, Haddad says that the technology will be applied to other platforms, like mobile phones. And it only has two employees, both co-founders.
The company seems like a likely acquisition target for Google or any other company looking to expand to Arabic-speaking nations, where Haddad says development has been relatively slow.
Yep Yamil is great. i know many people use arabizi which is writing arabic using english letters, this tool is great it is a real solution.
happy to see arabic startup covered here, and Cong. Hadad.
here is my story about yamli API:
http://arabcrun...ny-website.html
congralutation yamli
This is very fantastic and work very good for Arabic speaker
It’s a great feeling to see that one can talk about disruptive technologies in a global world. Good luck to everyone at Yamli– I hope they wont sell too soon, I’m sure they have plenty to do before any of that…
On behalf of the Woopra Team, I congratulate you guys for the great job you have done so far. I’ve been using your service for a while now and it has been a very useful.
I’m looking forward to see you soon.
Elie.
Great Job Yamli team. You guys have put together an utterly useful tool. I can not only express myself fluently and spontaneously in my mother-tongue language, but I can also type in Arabic as fast as I type in English.
Yamli is the bestest!!!
Congrats to Habib and Imad (I know them personally). Both are really good guys who have earned their success. One of the greatest things about Yamli is that it’s actually solving a real problem for real users, and it’s not an easy problem either. In addition, the system gets smarter the more people use it, which is a great aspect of their product.
I find Yamli really useful as well… it works great for searching arabic content on the web.
ألف مبروك إلى حبيب و عماد على هذا الإنجاز التكنولجي المتقن والمفتخر فيه ! إلى الأمام يا شباب وللأعلى !
Get ready for interest-free loan spam!
Gr8 job Habeeb,
I loving yamli Idea so much, and i hope every thing to be gr8.
Greetings
I’m so happy to see Yamli become popular for the arab world & espically for the arab student in the westeren society. Yamli really made the best tool ever for writing arabic.
Some school don’t offer the arabic keyboard in their computeres & they don’t allow you to add. However, after Yamli came in , no needs for the arabic keyboard now.
I’m so proud of you guys eventhough I don’t really know the founders very well, but i’m so proud that one of my brotheres in the arab world did something we should all be proud of it.
Many congrats to all of you guys Habib & Imad
I wasn’t amazed when I found TC wrote Yamli. I love the idea behind Yamli, and I love how it’s developed and presented. Keep up the good work guys
Great job Habib
Yamli is an interesting idea that addresses an issue. This issue is especially a problem for those using computers without an Arabic keyboard, a problem perhaps every single Arab has faced at least once in a lifetime.
Great work Habib and Imad .. we’re still looking forward for future implementation of the technology at a wider scale
great work guys, we as lebanese are proud of you. !!!!
The Arabs have always had a knack for disruptive technology.
Congrats to Habib and Imad , you have done very good tool.
Yamli is truly visionary, and solves a major issue that even the major corporations failed to address. The approach is brilliant and the interface is awesome. Not to mention the availability of a public API for site owners and for Facebook. The result is an amazing product! I’m proud to be one of their very first beta testers for the API, it solved a major problem for my US readers who can’t type in Arabic but needed the functionality.
Did I mention that it’s also completely free, and ad driven? Now that’s really smart!
Way to go Imad and Habib, you guys ROCK!
This tool rocks! I really enjoy using it… Not only for search but to send fun messages to my friends! way to go Yamli!
Brilliant.
I could already think of zillion use of this
Good job guy’s.
great man .. thats a good piece of news . http://crossaff...rs.blogspot.com
Bringing back the arabs to the innovation map… Thank you Yamli Team
I have no idea where that 60% statistic came from, I have seen way more Arab people type English words in Arabic than vice versa. They have the entire OS in Arabic, why would they type in English?
I doubt that ANYONE will use this when they have an Arabic keyboard because typing Arabic in Arabic letters is usually faster because Romanized version of the words is longer. Example: Salam is five letters in English, but it is four letters in Arabic.
However, when I tested it I was amazed by how fast and accurate it is. I’m sure that it will be helpful for those who do not have access to an Arabic keyboard and want to type in Arabic and I guess those are likely to be Arabs living outside the Arab world.
Salam is actually three key strokes
its amazingly useful for people who need it .. when you first think of it you might not find it useful if you live in an Arab country and use Arabic as a first language .. but and its amazing when you know how many people that live in Arab countries but don’t have/use Arabic keyboards or even if they do, they might not know how to type in Arabic because they are used to type in English!
i believe its similar in India .. they normally type in English .. but imagine if they can type in Urdo using English letters but pronounced in Urdo? simple .. easy .. to the point .. not learning curve required.
Good Luck
I’m working with naharnet now as a project manager and had the chance working with a lot of arab community as web developer(jeeran, tootcorp, maktoob) , I’m using Yamli API almost all the time, we have integrated it with http://www.ikbis.com while i was working there, and with http://www.tahawor.com, and we wanna use it with some mobile Apps and with some Semantic approach we r creating for new naharnet site. it is actually one of the most innovative service for the arab region, and that’s because of its simplicity and cuz it is very accurate, surely we reached more arab users using the Yamli API .
I had the chance to meat Habib Haddad and had some chat with Emad too , there are just amazing , very cool and very, very smart .
Keep Up the good work Yamli team .
So this is disambiguation as you type, with multiple possible words displayed on screen, a default choice that gets selected automatically as you proceed to the next word, and no pre-input or post-input actuation key, right? This reminds me of some Nuance/Tegic patents. I am curious how they worked around it, if they did.
This also works for an arabic speaker who cannot write arabic properly it is an absolutly terrific tool
Yamli brought Arabic back to the web for me. Thanks Habib!
It’s great to see Yamli’s great product covered here on TechCrunch; Congrats to Habib and Imad
I hope this is only the beginning, and that we see more Arab startups covered here too.
There are a number of startups that I’ve covered on StartUpArabia and think have a worldwide potential; I hope they get on TechCrunch’s radar as well
Same feeling Mohamad Meddah for startups covered at ArabCrunch
congrats guys. its drop dead simple and it works…keep it up
That’s pretty cool. Anything that opens the web to more people, or makes it easier to access has got to make a big impact…I had never considered the keyboard was a problem.
Great to see techcrunch covering this stuff.
Excellent job and excellent idea for all of us who never used an arabic keyboard !
Keep up the good work !
Wow ! It actually works.
Yamli’s awesome, but it’s API implementation just rocks! I use it the most in Facebook with the Yamli API.
great stuff … so many arab site using it like ikbis and all
Wonderful. Small teams can do great stuff. What’s their current business model? did Goog or MS actually already lay eyes on them?
Does is work with an English keyboard as well?
It’s a good news for the Arabic speaker, but I think it’ll be very coplex to type an Arabic word.
I am sorry to say , but this looks like a straight rip-off from Onkosh http://www.onkosh.com A site that took years of research and work. I am sorry to see that we still do not respect rights of inventors. This is far from vsiionary, please do not cheer it.
Oh, don’t be a cry baby, Onkosh doesn’t even work. Every reader here agrees with me that it’s not about doing something, it’s about doing it right … Facebook vs MySpace, Google vs Yahoo … Onkosh should focus on getting their stuff working or at the very least user friendly …
“don’t be a cry baby” … i think this is impolite comment!!!
Onkosh is a search engine which Yamli is not. I agree with Bassam (previous post) if Onkosh worked we wouldn’t be talking about Yamli. I will add that Yamli has patents for its code which means they did not rip off anybody’s idea they just do it differently and better. And yes I think it’s visionary. After all Google was not the first search engine.
who can gurentee? Onkosh also says they have their own patent long before yamli?
Congrats to Yamli, it’s really a great website. Everyone in our office in Dubai is using it already. Can’t wait to see what happens to the blogosphere once API becomes widespread.
Great job guys. I really enjoyed testing and using Yamli.
I wish you all the best. Keep up the good work.
TOO BAD TO SEE A ‘STOLEN’ IDEA IN FRONT OF A LEGAL WELL_ESTABLISHED SEARCH ENGINE HTTP://WWW.ONKOSH.COM — see when was Onkosh out in Jan 2007, and Yamli came second in Sept of same year. Enough time to reinvent the wheel with a nicer interface?
Guys, what are you comparing? Yamli is nothing but a wrapper over Google. They have nothing new, while Onkosh is a large and complete search engine that has the translitaration feature as an addition to their excellent services!
Who is Original? :-\
Onkosh or Yamli? In fact I knew Onkosh long before Yamli, and it is really an excellent and ambitious startup!
I belive onksh deserve the regognition and honors afterall
Can we plz Focus on the Date of release each project
Onkosh was released in Jan 2006 & Yamli was released in middle of 2007.
Bel3arby Feature On onkosh have a lot of versions Update, each version made a significant change on the Translitration Result, i monitor this.
Can any one tell me about which versions That Yamli released Before the Current one.
Let me talk about what the objective of making it easy to use the Arabic char in the Web, is that only that you write something in Latin char & get it translated Into Arabic, i think not, i will not using feature Like that if it will give me only translitration, but i gonna use it if i can search by the word i had Translated.
So, finall as the main objective of the search engines in the World, which is to find the Better way & the easist way to get the result you need on the shortest way in the shortest Time.
So onkosh is trying to satisfy that Objective by Making feature Like Bel3arby & Deviding the web search into sectors Like, Files, Forum, Image.
Now Can any one tell me who is making a Significant Change in the Web in arabic
Guys guys, take it easy and well put Ron !
As I said before, and I think everyone here agrees it’s not about doing it, it about doing it RIGHT.
Transliteration existed long before both of Yamli and Onkosh … This is not a new concept at all, in fact this existed since 1958 for Chinese with pinyin…
The innovation Yamli is bringing is not in the idea, it’s in the accuracy and the user friendliness but in any case your angry comments will definitely be not help Onkosh nor the Arabic web.
Let the user decide …
Why all the onkosh people rage ? Let the users decide which is better for them. I think they’re even aiming for different audiences. Onkosh seems more like a games site.
neat tool. took me less than 5mins to integrate that api into a page.