CAIRO - Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab (CMIC) recently announced the launch of “Microsoft Afkar”, a portal which targets Arabic speaking Internet users. Microsoft Afkar presents a number of free smart tools that seek to enhance the quality of Arabic content on the Internet and to offer a variety of new experiences and methods that facilitate usage for Arabic users including content authoring, consumption, translation and online communication. “Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world and yet, despite dramatic recent growth of Internet penetration in the Arab World and the enormous appetite for technology and media, only around 1.4 per cent of online digital content is in Arabic,” said Hussein Salama, Director of CMIC. “Our focus at CMIC has always been to provide the people in our region with technologies that enable them to fully utilise computers and the Internet to fulfill their personal and business needs. The launch of “Microsoft Afkar” takes us one step closer helping users to share ideas and technologies by improving the Arabic authoring experience,” added Salama. The current release of Microsoft Afkar includes four applications: 1) Three variations of Maren Transliteration: An easy to use tool that allows Internet users to write in Arabic script using an English keyboard. The tool converts Franco Arab letters to their equivalents in Arabic instantaneously. Maren Transliteration is available in the form of a desktop application, a browser bookmark and JavaScript code for web masters. 2) Maren Autocomplete: A smart tool that automatically attempts to infer what words the user is trying to type and offers alternative suggestions based on the writing context. 3) Maren Multilingual Authoring: Users can simply type in classic Arabic or Romanised Arabic a word in an English sentence. The application then gives you an instant and accurate English translation using Bing Translator. 4) Maren Morph: Maren Morph automatically analyses a given Arabic word and displays possible analyses with corresponding diacritics for each analysis. The presented word analyses are ranked in a way that reflects their actual usage in written Arabic text, based on words usage statistics. Commenting on the portal Riham, Hassan Sallam, professor of computer science, Virginia Tech University said: “I have found many of the ideas and tools offered in Microsoft Afkar portal are attractive to use, in particular the Maren Reader, Maren Transliteration, and AutoComplete as they deal with the new trend of typing Franco Arabic words that not everybody been able to read or write. Further, the transliteration is sometimes very useful for non-Arabic keyboards or people who are not professional Arabic typewriters.” Sally Hamouda, PHD student, Virginia Tech University said, “It brings Arabic back to life! Now, I can read and write the Quran, poetry and well-known sayings in Arabic, exactly like it is supposed to be written and I am able to communicate much easier and faster with my friends in my mother tongue language. Microsoft Afkar facilitates searching for a lot of information that I frequently need and cannot find in English like prayer times, Egyptian food recipes and daily use of herbs by old Arabians for a healthy life. I hope that everyone knows about this exciting portal! ” In addition to these tools, Microsoft Afkar presents a new and creative tool called WikiBhasha, which is a tool to create content for Wikipedia in many languages. The tool can translate Wikipedia articles from English via Machine translation so that the user can revise and re-write these articles in a better way before publishing on Arabic Wikipedia. Microsoft Afkar portal also showcases the “Bing Instant Answers” service, which is a simple and fast way to retrieve the most relevant results in response to Bing queries. Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab developed two answers; the first presents accurate prayer times in all Arab capitals in response to relevant queries and the second is an instant translator that presents immediate translation of words entered in the Bing search box. The Bing translator automatically translates web content from 32 world languages including Arabic. “I would encourage anyone interested in the development of Arabic content and knowledge online to visit the portal and download the free applications. Localization is a key player and a necessity in the Middle East market,” concluded Salama.
