AI models tested for Arabic
Does it actually work for Saudi, Najdi, Hijazi or Gulf Arabic? Benchmarks rarely say. The community tests these models on real speech and text — and reports back.
TII's hybrid Transformer–Mamba series and its current open-weight flagship, released in sizes from 0.5B to 34B. Unlike Falcon 3, the model card lists Arabic among its 18 supported languages, making this the largest openly downloadable TII model with declared Arabic support.
Whisper large-v3
OpenAI
State-of-the-art open speech recognition covering 99+ languages and the default open ASR baseline for Arabic products, though Arabic is one language among many rather than a focus and dialectal Arabic remains its weak point. Note the licence inconsistency: this model card states Apache 2.0 while the openai/whisper GitHub repo and the large-v3-turbo card state MIT.
Aya Expanse 32B
Cohere Labs
Open-weight multilingual model covering 23 languages including Arabic. The licence is non-commercial (CC-BY-NC-4.0) plus Cohere's acceptable use addendum, so it cannot be used in commercial Arabic products.