Dubai: Yahoo! announced that it has acquired a licence to Yamli's transliteration technology, to be integrated across a number of its products and services. This comes as part of Yahoo!'s focus on developing solutions tailored for the Middle East and North Africa region, and will allow Yahoo! Maktoob to further develop the technology and extend it to a wider audience across its network.
Yamli was founded in 2007 by Lebanese entrepreneurs Habib Haddad and Imad Jureidini, who came up with the idea of a "Smart Arabic Keyboard" that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard or if they are not used to using one. They created a technology based on a real-time transliteration engine which converts words typed with Latin characters to their Arabic equivalent. Yahoo! Maktoob's product is called "3arrebni" (Arabise me).
As a first phase, "3arrebni" has launched as a standalone destination page, and will soon be accessible through Yahoo! Maktoob's homepage. The following months will see the product seamlessly integrated with Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail in Arabic, Yahoo! Search, and in areas requiring user generated input such as Yahoo! Maktoob Forums and in the comments sections of Yahoo! Maktoob's media properties, including News.
The Smart Arabic Keyboard allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard, from within their web browser. This technology is based on a real-time transliteration engine which converts words typed with Latin characters to their closest Arabic equivalent. Yamli Arabic Search is a search engine focused on providing more relevant search results for an Arabic query by expanding it to its most frequently used Latin representations.
"With the introduction of "3arrebni" across our products and platforms, we are enriching Arabic content online by enabling participation that brings Arabic characters to the forefront, which often times would have been done using the English language or Latin characters. We're very excited to be bringing this service to our users, and potentially introducing this solution to a whole new audience for the first time," Ahmed Nassef, Vice President and Managing Director, Yahoo! Maktoob, said.
