Just as Google started to up its game in the Middle East region and verbally confirming it via their CEO Eric Schmidt at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit earlier this month, that the MENA region is among Google’s fastest growing markets. Today has marked a changing point for the web giant in the region, with the launch of Tashkeel, their new Arabic specific diacritics tool.
According to Google “This tool adds missing diacritics to Arabic text”. Diacritics, also known as vocalizations, are to Arabic what vowels are to Latin. They determine how words are read and pronounced and can thus change the meaning of words. they also change in words according to their position in a sentence (object, object of preposition, etc.)
This means that Arabic speakers/writers/readers don’t need to manually type 20-50% more in order to get the exact word they’re searching for. Adding diacritics is an important pre-step to several text processing applications
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