TII launches Falcon-Emirati, Falcon-ASR and Falcon-OCR-Arabic
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
Your AI and this story
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Key facts
- Falcon-Emirati: 7B parameters, built on Falcon-H1-Arabic; 84.83% on Alyah, an Emirati Arabic benchmark; available in Falcon Chat (chat.falconllm.tii.ae)
- Falcon-ASR: 1.6B parameters, builds on Falcon3-Audio (arXiv 2509.07526); word-level timestamps; one set of weights for all languages
- Falcon-ASR, Arabic: average WER 20.92% on six Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard test sets, against a best published 23.17% (Hugging Face blog by TII)
- Falcon-ASR, internal Emirati test: WER 22.73%, CER 10.19%, 4.07 WER points better than Qwen3-Omni, the next best system; TII says it beat a 30B-parameter multimodal model
- Falcon-ASR, English: mean WER 5.74% on seven Open ASR Leaderboard test sets
- Access: a public demo Space (tiiuae/falcon-asr-demo); API access and native apps are planned; license and model repository not stated
What happened
TII, the applied-research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, presented the three models as sovereign language technology. TII chief executive Najwa Aaraj said: “Sovereign AI capability must reflect the language used in daily life.” Hakim Hacid, chief researcher of TII’s AI and Digital Research Center, said the team “applied targeted specialization to language, speech and document understanding”. Falcon-OCR-Arabic extracts Arabic text, tables and formulas from images and documents; TII gave no figures for it.
Why it matters
Dialectal Arabic has far less transcribed speech than Modern Standard Arabic, so small models tuned for one dialect can beat much larger general models on it. The comparison rests on TII’s internal Emirati test set, which is not public.
Sources
4 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 primary, 1 press
Primary
- TII: TII launches Falcon-Emirati alongside new Arabic AI models for speech and visual text understandingtii.ae, official
- Hugging Face blog (TII): Falcon-ASRhuggingface.co, official
- Falcon-ASR demo Spacehuggingface.co, code
Press
- RuntimeWire: TII says its 1.6B Falcon-ASR beats larger models on its Emirati testruntimewire.com, press
Changes
- Filed (evening)