Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) announced three Arabic AI models on 6 October 2026. The main one, Falcon-Emirati, is a language model with 7 billion parameters (a rough measure of a model’s size), trained on native Emirati content, Modern Standard Arabic material about Emirati culture and heritage, and synthetic data.
TII said Falcon-Emirati scored 84.83% on Alyah, a benchmark of native Emirati Arabic, ahead of every open-source Arabic and multilingual model it evaluated. The institute said the model will be available through its Falcon Chat platform.
The other two models handle speech and documents. Falcon-ASR, with 1.6 billion parameters, turns speech into text in Emirati Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and records when each word is spoken. Falcon-OCR-Arabic is a lightweight model that extracts Arabic text, tables and formulas from images and documents.
Why it matters: the model is designed to capture the dialect’s everyday words, phrases and sayings, according to the WAM report of the launch. TII’s chief executive, Dr Najwa Aaraj, said “sovereign AI capability must reflect the language used in daily life”. A model built for the dialect could make voice services and apps easier to use for Emirati speakers.
What to watch: the benchmark results are TII’s own, and the announcement cites no independent testing. It also does not say whether the models will be released for others to download.