We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Wittify AI, a visionary startup building Arabic-first conversational AI. Together, we’re creating the world’s most natural, nuanced Arabic voices for real-world use cases—call centers, IVR systems, customer support—not just broadcast-style scripts.
The Problem with Arabic Voice AI Today
Most AI voice systems today sound like they’re reading a bedtime story. Stilted. Overly formal. And almost always in Modern Standard Arabic—a version of the language hardly anyone uses in conversation. Real Arabic is musical, regional, and deeply expressive.
And that’s the challenge.
Arabic isn’t one language. It’s a mosaic of dialects, Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, North African, all with massive differences.
Even within the Gulf, regional variations can make voices feel foreign. For example, Saudi Arabic has its own distinct sound, vocabulary, and pronunciation that immediately signals a Saudi identity, especially the Najdi and Hijazi dialects. Meanwhile Emirati Arabic has a softer tone and distinct expressions shaped by local heritage, making it easily recognizable across the Gulf.
Lebanese Arabic is often praised for its melodic quality, which stems from the gentler pronunciation of certain sounds. Moroccan Arabic, with its mix of Amazigh, French, and Arabic, is often unintelligible to other Arabic speakers. Egyptian Arabic is widely intelligible due to its dominance in media, but it’s immediately recognizable as Egyptian. However, if you’re not in Egypt and your agent is speaking Egyptian Arabic, that’s like someone at Chick-Fil-A speaking in British English.
Why Most TTS Fails
Big tech claims they support "70+ languages." But the reality? Most only sound decent in two or three. For Arabic, they stick to newscaster-style Modern Standard Arabic—what some call “Shakespearean Arabic.” It’s completely unusable for real conversations.
Our Approach: Authenticity from the Ground-Up
Together with Wittify, we’re solving this the hard—and right—way:
Real dialect data: We're working together on building a labeled conversation recordings across dialects.
From-scratch models: Rime is training new text-to-speech models for multiple varieties of Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and North African Arabic.
Deep linguistic expertise: Our team builds TTS from first principles, tuning for rhythm, tone, prosody, and emotional nuance.
This is what it takes to sound truly human.
Why It Matters
There’s massive demand for high-quality Arabic voices—from telcos to fintech to government. But until now, no one has built models that reflect how people actually talk. We’re changing that.
And we’re not stopping with Arabic.
This partnership signals a broader opportunity: if your business needs authentic voice AI in any dialect or language, Rime is your partner. We bring the tools, the team, and the tech to build voices that feel real.
Let’s Talk
Want to collaborate on building voice AI for your language or region? Reach out. Let’s build something real, together.
