NPR’s All Tech Considered has a great story about Yamli – a very cool technology helping users connect through Arabic.
You can use your regular keyboard and non-Arabic input to search in Arabic. According to the story:
“The idea is, if you don’t have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically.” …. “For example … when you’re writing the word ‘falafel,’ Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword.”
The technology recently “best in show” at a recent “new” technology forum at MIT. Very neat.
