Arabnet Arabnet

Yahoo! and Yamli have just announced that the American search giant has acquired a license to Yamli’s real-time transliteration technology. Yamli’s smart Arabic keyboard which initially launched in 2007 has sold several licenses prior to the Yahoo! deal but the latest represents its biggest milestone yet according to Yamli Founder Habib Haddad.

Yahoo! will use the technology to power “3arrebni”, a new service which has already launched on Yahoo! Maktoob, and will also integrate it with other products including Yahoo! Mail and Messenger among many others.

Yamli’s website meanwhile will remain intact, its search will still be powered by Bing, and the company will continue working towards improving its accuracy. The team however plans to shift its business model more towards B2B services and more licensing agreements.

Yamli originally launched in November 2007 and has since been the leader in the field. “The amount of words processed through Yamli exceeds 3.5 Billion, equal to 12 Million Wikipedia articles” explained Habib, “Yahoo! did research and testing and found out that Yamli’s accuracy stands at 98%.”