Why Arabtronics

I have been developing software applications for more than 40 years, 30 of them at a professional level. Whether coding, publishing, or general writing, my primary language was English. The vast majority of my career has been in the United States, supporting an English-speaking market. That made the use of Arabic with computers or mobile phones nearly absent except when required, such as in media publications. The rapid rise of English-based social media made it even more common to hear people around the world speak and understand English. The deep integration of Latin characters, especially English, into computers and the Internet is rapidly rendering many mother-tongue languages second-class in the digital age, with Chinese languages being a notable exception.

I am Arab and Lebanese. My primary language should be Arabic. I should be speaking, writing, and communicating in Arabic. Yet my life has been deep in tech and in the United States, which by default has been all English-based. Except when conversing with family and friends back home in Lebanon, my Arabic was always limited. I even grew to despise typing in Arabic as a kid because everything I used with computers, from as early as 8-bit machines, was all in English. Now, in my 50s, I look at myself, the technologies, and the social world around me and fear that the Arabic language is rapidly declining as technologies advance.

I founded Arabtronics to dig deep into the roots of the Arabic language and computers, both hardware and software, and innovate with new products that serve the Arab community. The technology market is currently flooded with generative AI models that support Arabic, or academic publications that are mainly theoretical and focus on Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. There are few modern applications that treat Arabic as a first-class language rather than an educational subject. Building software and interacting with hardware devices, such as consoles, keyboards, and development boards, is primarily in English.

I plan to combine hardware, mainly keyboards, micro controllers, and custom electronics, with software to build practical solutions that entice Arab technology enthusiasts to support the Arabic language. Some people say that building new practical solutions for Arabic is either dead on arrival or was proven unsuccessful in the past, so why bother? It may be true. But very few attempts have incorporated hardware into Arabic-based solutions. More importantly, even if I build a product that brings life to the Arabic language, the audience may no longer exist. They may have long given up their language in favor of English.

Even so, I hope that if I make a dedicated effort to support Arabic, I will find others who share the same goals. Together, we can build a community of Arab tech enthusiasts who believe two things: that the Arabic language should not be an afterthought, and that Arab technologies can be as valuable as Western technologies to the Arab world, if not more.