ABU DHABI, 13th November, 2026 (WAM) -- UAE-developed artificial intelligence models are strengthening national capabilities through advanced technologies designed to understand Emirati Arabic, process documents and support digital services across key sectors.
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), is advancing these technologies through its Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science Research Centre.
Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher at the centre, told the Emirates News Agency (WAM) that the Falcon family of AI models demonstrates how advanced, efficient artificial intelligence can be developed without requiring vast computing resources.
He highlighted three innovations: Falcon-Emirati, Falcon-ASR and Falcon-OCR-Arabic, designed to improve AI capabilities in local language understanding, speech recognition and document processing.
Built on Falcon-H1-Arabic and trained using Emirati linguistic and cultural resources, Falcon-Emirati scored 84.83% on the Alyah benchmark, which evaluates understanding of Emirati Arabic, everyday expressions, heritage knowledge and poetry, outperforming the Arabic and multilingual open-source models included in the evaluation.
Hacid explained that 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 could support healthcare, education and government services, enabling users to communicate with government entities in their local dialect, verbally or in writing, while facilitating clinical documentation and multilingual patient communication.
Hacid also emphasised the importance of developing national research talent, sharing AI models and research findings, and strengthening partnerships with universities and technology companies to advance innovation.
He highlighted TII's collaboration with NVIDIA, which led to 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 support the UAE's efforts to strengthen its position as a global centre for research, development and technological innovation, while advancing a knowledge-based economy and sustainable development.