Do you know a foreign person who is learning Arabic? Perhaps she has told you about the difficulty she has encountered in understanding it, and the difficulty in mastering it compared to other languages; The Arabic language is distinguished by its many rules, its large number of words, its rich linguistic structures and its writing style which differs from most other languages, not to mention its multiplicity of dialects and its differences each other and even by Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Well, it seems that these difficulties did not only affect humans but also machines. Amazon’s intelligent voice assistant, Alexa, has faced many challenges in her journey to learn the Arabic language. For a long time, researchers have struggled to develop AI systems that can process Arabic and understand local dialects. But today, when you use one of the smart devices manufactured by Amazon, like the Amazon Echo speaker, and talk to Alexa in Arabic and receive her response, you will feel that the matter is simple and that teaching her Arabic could have been nothing more what an extensive training process on several huge datasets. But the reality is that this learning journey has been arduous and has come with unique challenges that no system has faced
