Stories › Models › TII launches Falcon-Emirati and two Arabic models for speech and documents Image: WAM EN First reported 6 October 2026 · Updated 12 October 2026 · 7 sources · 3 countries
TII launches Falcon-Emirati and two Arabic models for speech and documents Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) launched three AI models on 7 October 2026 at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi. Falcon-Emirati understands the Emirati dialect, Falcon-ASR turns speech in six languages into text, and Falcon-OCR-Arabic reads Arabic text from images and documents. TII’s performance claims come from its own tests.
What happened
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WAM reported that TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, launched the three models on 7 October. Gulf Business said Falcon-Emirati is a 7-billion-parameter model built for Emirati Arabic. In TII’s evaluation, it outperformed the Arabic and multilingual open models it was compared with. WAM said Falcon-ASR converts spoken Emirati Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese into text. ASR stands for automatic speech recognition. Gulf News said Falcon-OCR-Arabic brings Arabic optical character recognition (reading text from images) and document understanding to the Falcon family. MarkTechPost reported that Falcon-ASR has 1.6 billion parameters and published TII’s word error rates, the share of words a model transcribes wrongly. These are TII’s own figures. WAM quoted TII CEO Najwa Aaraj saying sovereign AI capability must reflect the language people use in daily life. Gulf Business noted the launch follows MBZUAI’s K2 Horizon models in September. ITP.net, My Startup World and Konsulteer also covered it. What it adds up to
For office work, the most useful of the three is the least talked about: Falcon-OCR-Arabic. Many teams still retype Arabic text from scanned letters, invoices and forms because general tools read it poorly. If that’s you, collect five typical Arabic documents this week and test how well your current AI tool extracts the text. When an Arabic-specific tool is available to you, run the same five through it and compare. Check every extracted number against the original before relying on it.
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