Arabic, Hebrew Language AI Gets Major Boost from Israel Innovation Authority

The Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) announced on Wednesday a 30 million shekel ($7.88 million) investment in 17 projects aimed at enhancing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in processing spoken Arabic and Hebrew. The projects aim to form a foundational infrastructure for AI research and development that necessitates the handling of these languages. According to the IIA, Hebrew and Arabic processing in AI significantly lags behind languages like English.

Among the funded projects are initiatives for information extraction from audio recordings, bidirectional translation models between Arabic and Hebrew, a speech-to-text service, and a model to identify harmful text content. IIA CEO Dror Bin emphasized the critical nature of these projects, stating they will unlock Israel’s unique data potential in Arabic and Hebrew, encourage AI adoption in various industries, and propel innovation in the country.