Yahoo Obtains A License to Yamli’s Technology

Every day, Yahoo comes up with loads of gossips and stories but still it is progressing at a fast pace.

Yamli is a tool that enables its users to write Arabic without using an Arabic keyboard. This technology is basically a transliteration engine which allows users who type in Latin charters to locate the most accurate equivalent Arabic term. Launched in 2007, it truly benefits hundreds of millions of users all over the world and has captured a huge market. Besides that, Yamli provides pertinent search results for an ‘Arabic web’.

Yahoo has obtained a license to Yamli’s technology and announced that their existing products will be integrated with Yamli in the coming months.  Yamli’s present technologies will be incorporated into Yahoo! Maktoob and will ultimately form a new product, “3arrebni,” or “Arabize me.” It will be exuded on Maktoob’s homepage and will be integrated into Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Main in Arabic, Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Maktoob Forums. In addition to that, it will be featured in the comments section of media products like Yahoo! Maktoob News.

This is surely a clever move which will help Yahoo to capture a huge market in the Arab world. Besides that, the terms of deals were not unveiled and it was made for an undisclosed amount.

Almost 60% of the Internet users who speak Arabic have an aversion to use an Arabic keyboard while many of them have to use a Latin keyboard in their offices or schools, which eventually makes these keyboards impracticable. So they started using a phonetic web language. This enables users to interpret Arabic words with Latin letters. Yamli allows users to type words phonetically into a particular text field that exhibits a list of identical words that are written in Arabic. Now they can use their Latin keyboard, without having the irksome resulting text. There are around 22 vernaculars in the Arab world, and the best part is Yamli is capable of dealing with multiple phonetic spellings.