An AI assistant in Arabic: what to test before you launch

Why Arabic needs its own testing

Most assistants are tried in English first. Arabic-speaking customers write differently: in dialect, in formal Arabic, in Latin letters, and often in a mix of Arabic and English in one message. An assistant that shines in a demo can still miss many of your real questions.

Dialects and mixed messages

Test with the way your customers actually write:

• Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine or Sudanese dialect, not only formal Arabic.
• Arabic written in Latin letters and numbers, such as "kam el se3r".
• Mixed messages, such as an Arabic sentence with an English product name.
• Voice notes turned into text, if your customers send them.

Spelling and search

The same word can be written several ways, and the assistant has to find the right document either way:

• Different alef forms (أ، إ، آ، ا) and hamza written or left out.
• Taa marbuta and haa at the end of a word (ة and ه), and alef maqsura and yaa (ى and ي).
• Diacritics present or missing.
• Arabic-Indic digits (٠١٢٣) and Western digits (0123) in prices, dates and phone numbers.

Answers people can trust

The assistant should answer from your own documents and show where each answer came from. When it has no source, it should say so in plain Arabic and pass the question to a person.

How to test it

Collect twenty real questions from your inbox or WhatsApp, in the words customers used, and write the right answer next to each. Run the assistant on all twenty and mark each reply right, wrong or handed to a person. Fix the documents or settings until the wrong answers are gone, then repeat with twenty new questions.

Right-to-left details

Check the chat window itself: text aligned to the right, punctuation in the right place, numbers and English words reading correctly inside Arabic sentences, and dates in the format your customers expect.