Building Bilingual AI for the Middle East: Arabic and English

Arabic Is Not One Language

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) differs substantially from Gulf Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and other dialects. A medical scribe serving Saudi clinicians needs to understand Gulf dialect speech while producing MSA clinical documentation.

GPT-4 and Arabic: Better Than Expected

GPT-4 Turbo handles MSA extremely well. Our solution: Azure Speech Services for dialect-aware transcription, post-processing to normalise to MSA, then GPT-4 for clinical note generation.

RTL UI: More Than Text Direction

Right-to-left layout isn't just flipping text direction. Date formats, number rendering, icon placement, progress indicators, and form flow all need reconsidering.

Saudi Cloud Compliance

Healthcare data in Saudi Arabia falls under the Health Data Management Regulation (HDMR). Azure's UAE North and Saudi Arabia regions are the relevant deployment targets.