We are happy to announce the Yamli Arabic Query Expander, first of our many offerings to enterprises. The new service solves fundamental problems in search and data normalization, by smartly identifying all the English and Arabic script variations of an Arabic word.

Imagine that a simple name like “Mohamed Mansour” has at least 80 ways of spelling it, “Mohamed Saleh Abdallah”  on the other hand has 7000 variations, “Jumeirah” the street in Dubai has at least 51 spellings, and the song “Habibi Ya Nor El Ein “can be spelled in 1207 variations.

Applications like banking, identity management,  address management, media management and others can make use of the Yamli Query Expander today.  The expander simply plugs in and works directly with existing database and search engine set up. This technology uses Yamli’s powerful algorithms coupled with the collected intelligence ensuring a very comprehensive coverage.

Among its features the Yamli Arabic Query Expander offers:

• Expansion of a query into all its Arabic and English variations. For example عبد الله , عبدالله, Aballah, Abdullah, Abdalla etc … This could be applied to people/place names and media content but to also any generic Arabic word.
• Frequency and ranking bias with each expanded result.
• Data cleansing and deduplication, to eliminiate duplicate entries and make sure the databases are in sync.

If you are interested in testing or if you would like to be a reseller of the technology contact us at team@yamli.com, in the meantime enjoy the funny video below

Yamli has enabled typing of 250 Million Arabic words and we are proud to be contributors in the increase of Arabic content online. We are also happy that so far more than 700 websites have included Yamli with the recent addition of Netlog the largest European social network with strong presence in the Middle East and D1G one of the largest community sites in the Arab world. If you want to integrate Yamli on your site or tools check our easy setup page.

Happy Arabic typing

Machine translation is a very tough problem and many have been doing a great job at improving its accuracy like Google, Babelfish and Sakhr. While we realize these tools solve a major problem, they don’t tackle one important piece: the flexibility to perfect the translated text.  Perhaps it’s because they assume that users translate text for the purpose of reading it rather then actually using it for a blog post, email, document etc …

A couple of weeks ago we asked you how often you use translation tools and how you use them. We listened to your answers and decided to hack a quick translation tool as an experiment in finding a more natural interaction.  We used Google’s translation API on the back end, while we focused on providing a free flowing end-user experience to allow them to perfect the translated text and easily move between the input and output.

This is still in the experimental stage so you might find a bunch of bugs but we would love to hear your feedback and find out whether you think we are moving in the right direction. Give it a try at  www.yamli.com/translate/

Only a few days ago, Google announced a new official version of Chrome that supports extensions.  As soon as we got the news we jumped right at developing an extension for Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard. We faced a few kinks but we are now happy to officially launch Yamli for Chrome.

So give it a try and let us know what you think If you like it share it with your friends and leave your reviews on the Chrome extension page.

You might notice that the extension doesn’t work on all sites (for example Gmail) and this is due to a bug in Chrome. It should be fixed in the next Chrome update but in the meantime you’ll get notified if you are trying to enable the extension on a site that’s not supported

Want to work at Yamli and be part of the next big thing on the Arabic Web?

Like every other startup, we’re on a mission to change the world, in our case the Arab digital world. Our passion is to develop useful, intuitive, and innovative products for this extraordinary emerging market. We are not afraid of experimenting and love crazy ideas, and we want our team to feel like they are making a difference. If you are smart, like working in a group, love to learn, and aren’t afraid to try new things, you belong at Yamli. We are looking for both key junior and senior software engineers with expertise in the web or mobile spaces. We are still small, which means that everyone who joins will be able to make big impact and help us overcome major challenges with big rewards for hard work and creativity. We believe that at the at end of the day, it’s all about the people and want to build the top flight agile software engineering team in the Middle East.

Think you have what it takes? Shoot us your resume to jobs@yamli.com along with answers to following questions:

• What’s your favorite development platform on the server or client and why?
• Who is your hero in the development world and why?
• What one product or gadget can you not live without and why?
• What blogs/news do you follow?
• What’s the toughest bug you’ve had to fix and why?

Qualifications:

Web

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent.
• Extensive experience with one or more server side platforms (Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP, or even ASP.NET) and a solid understanding of what happens under the covers (HTTP).
• Extensive experience with client side development (HTML, CSS, Javascript and JS frameworks). UI/UX experience is also a plus.
• Knowledge of relational databases and SQL. Knowledge developing and debugging on Linux systems.

Mobile:

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent. Extensive experience developing for Symbian, iPhone, Android, BREW and/or Windows Mobile.
• Extensive experience with C/C++ and Java.
• Experience developing multi-platform desktop applications and plugins (Windows/Mac/Linux/Qt) is a plus.

We are also looking for web designers with a decent understanding of web technologies.

UI/UX Designers:

• Experience with illustration tools such as Adobe’s Creative Suite
• Experience in building interfaces using CSS, HTML, and/or JavaScript
• Ability to quickly prototype and iterate towards production-level quality
• Portfolios are welcome.

If your profile doesn’t quite fit, ping us anyway if you feel you can pick things up quickly and contribute. We offer competitive salaries and stock options, and are looking for applicants preferably able to work in Beirut, Lebanon. Telecommuting may be an option.

[Photo by swilsonmc ]

We decided today to run a little script to see how many words have been typed with Yamli so far, and the result was impressive: 76,645,541, that is roughly equivalent to 255,485 Wikipedia articles ! We are happy that the usage of Yamli has been growing but most importantly are happy to contribute in the expansion of the Arabic content online.

Today, Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard powers a number of sites, such as As7ab and Clipat Maktoob, Ikbis, Annahar, Art-TV and about 200 more sites. Although our focus is on Arabic native speakers Yamli has also been used at some universities to help teach Arabic.

We thank our users again for the support and will continue in building products to empower the Arabic web.

As some of you may know, we released a preview of our Firefox add-on last week. We didn’t go out of our way to publicize it, since we mostly wanted to get everyone’s feedback regarding the functionality, and bugs of course The response was very enthusiastic, but many of you wrote back suggesting to offer another non-toolbar mode.

Obviously many people have been traumatized by toolbars that popped out of nowhere after installing an unrelated piece of software, and especially with smaller resolutions people prefer to have a clean browser interface that maximize the browser content area .  On the other hand, toolbars can be very useful with the proper set of tools and added functionality.  So we decided to offer users the option:  You can choose to keep the full functionality of the toolbar, or you can go with a lighter and minimalistic option that we call the “mini mode”:

After you install the Yamli add-on, you will get to make the choice.  You can change the mode anytime later by clicking through the options.

I hope everyone who removed the toolbar will re-install the add-on (here) and give it a try.  I also want to let everyone know that we’re not done with Yamli for Firefox, and are open to everyone’s ideas and suggestions.  We have a few things that we think you’ll all enjoy that will progressively get included as we implement them.

Let us know what you think!

Welcome to the official blog of Yamli. We are very excited about the launch of this blog and look forward to share with you our products, thoughts and hear your feedback.

About a year and a half ago, we launched Yamli with the vision of empowering the Arabic language and users on the Web and thanks to your support and suggestions we are inching forward towards our goal, and we would like to thank you for that !

We also want to take this opportunity to present a preview of our new gadget, the Yamli Firefox toolbar. Many of you have asked for an easy way to type Arabic with Yamli on any site, including email, social networks and instant messengers. Thanks to your feedback and suggestions we have been working on providing this functionality through our most recent gadget.

The Yamli toolbar enables users to type Arabic on any site with a simple click of a button. The main trick was to get it working right with Rich Text Editors, which are usually found in webmail sites such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and others.  The toolbar also allows search and provides comprehensive search results.

We also thought it would be a cool idea to add a Facebook and Twitter feature so that you can directly update your status from the toolbar.

You can download the toolbar preview from here. This is the first version and we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on what we can add or do to improve on it. What do you think ?