Most AI chatbots out there are English-first — trained primarily on Western data and optimised for English users. That’s the gap Humain, a Saudi Arabian AI firm, wants to fill. It has launched Humain Chat, an Arabic-native chatbot built on the Allam large language model, which the company claims is the “world’s most advanced Arabic-first AI model", according to a report by Bloomberg.
Trained on what Humain describes as one of the largest Arabic datasets ever assembled, the bot is fluent in Arabic as well as English and supports multiple dialects, including Egyptian and Lebanese. The firm also stresses cultural sensitivity: the AI is designed to understand “Islamic culture, values, and heritage.” The app will first roll out in Saudi Arabia, before expanding across the Middle East and eventually serving the nearly 400 million Arabic speakers worldwide, as per the report.
"Humain Chat is built for the more than 400 million Arabic speakers and 2 billion Muslims worldwide who have been underserved by generative AI. For the first time, people can create, learn, and connect in their own language, culture, and context," said the startup in the announcement press release.
How does Humain work?
Humain says its new chatbot, powered by the ALLAM 34B model, is meant to close a longstanding gap in digital inclusion by prioritising Arabic and promoting what it calls “linguistic equality.” The company positions Humain Chat as more than just a translation tool, highlighting that its responses are designed to reflect Arabic language, values, heritage and history.
On the practical side, the app supports real-time web search to provide up-to-date information, Arabic speech input across multiple dialects, and smooth switching between Arabic and English within the same conversation. It also allows users to share conversations for collaboration, and the service is fully hosted on Humain’s infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, built to comply with the country’s Personal Data Protection Law.
But the project raises a few questions. Humain Chat began under the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, a government agency and regulator. That link makes it likely the bot will comply with Saudi censorship laws — restricting access to certain types of information, much like the country’s broader internet ecosystem.
Of course, the issue isn’t unique to Saudi Arabia. American chatbots also carry biases and constraints. OpenAI itself acknowledges ChatGPT is “skewed towards Western views.” Elon Musk’s xAI has openly experimented with reshaping Grok’s ideology based on user complaints about political “wokeness.” And earlier this year, the Trump administration laid out guidelines requiring AI companies to align their models with federal standards — rejecting “radical climate dogma” and avoiding “ideological biases” like diversity and inclusion if they want lucrative contracts.
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