An Arabic Chatbot That Understands the Dialect Your Customer Types

Because they were built in English and translated afterwards. Translation works for the interface: buttons, menus, system messages. It fails in the one place that matters, which is understanding what the customer actually wrote. English arrives clean and tidy. Arabic arrives without diacritics, with the hamza spelled three different ways, with letters repeated for tone, and with digits standing in for letters that have no Latin equivalent.

Then comes the second layer: dialect. "شلون" in the Gulf, "إزاي" in Egypt, and "كيف" in Modern Standard Arabic are three words for one question. A model trained on formal Arabic alone reads those as noise, so it returns a generic reply or asks the customer to rephrase, which is the moment most customers close the chat.

The third layer is code-switching inside a single sentence, which in the Gulf is the norm rather than the exception: "ممكن delivery لجدة؟" That is one question, not two, and a monolingual pipeline loses half of it.

This is where most Arabic chatbots break, and it is rarely mentioned on anyone's product page. You write your business information in Modern Standard Arabic: return policy, shipping fees, opening hours. You write it that way because that is how written Arabic works. Your customer asks in dialect. If retrieval depends on matching words, a question like "كم ياخذ الشحن للدمام؟" will never find a paragraph titled "رسوم الشحن ومدد التوصيل", and the bot will say it does not know while the answer sits right in front of it.

Retrieval in RevoplyAI is Arabic-aware for exactly this reason: a dialect question matches a knowledge base written in formal Arabic. You are not asked to write your policies five times over, and you are not asked to hand-maintain a synonym list.

This also gives you a test you can run on any tool before you pay for it. Write one policy in Modern Standard Arabic, then ask about it in three different dialects. A chatbot that answers three times out of three is built for this market. One that answers once is an English product wearing an Arabic interface.

Arab customers do not pick one channel and stay there. They message on WhatsApp because it is fastest, on Instagram because that is where they saw the post, and on your website because they were already reading the prices. The same assistant runs on all five: WhatsApp through the official Business API, Telegram, Instagram direct messages, Facebook Messenger, and the chat widget on your site.

More importantly, they all land in one shared inbox: contacts, labels, internal notes, assignment. The customer history belongs to the business rather than to whichever phone happened to receive the message, so when the same person writes again two weeks later on a different channel, your agent already has the thread.

It says so and brings in a person. That is not a footnote, it is the design: the assistant answers only from the knowledge base you gave it, so when the answer is not there, it does not improvise a plausible one. It tells the customer a colleague will follow up and flags the conversation for your team with the full thread attached.

You can also force that path. Rules hand over on a keyword, on a negative sentiment reading, or on any conversation a human has already joined, and the bot stops replying the moment an agent starts. A bot that invents a price you do not offer costs more than it saves, which is why silence here is a deliberate choice.

It reads voice notes up to two minutes, not longer. A message over roughly 300 words gets a polite request to shorten it rather than a half-answer. Reading customer photos is on Pro and Business, not on the free plan.

It does not reply to Instagram comments. The connection requests messaging permissions only, so comments are neither read nor answered. If comment automation is what you are shopping for, this is not the product.

It does not make phone calls, does not send email, and does not plug into your store to chase an abandoned cart. What it does is narrow and specific: read a message, understand it in Arabic, answer from your information, and hand over what it cannot answer. Five channels, any hour.

In a lot of tools, Arabic support is a line item on the top plan. Here it is baseline behaviour: the free plan understands dialects and replies in them, runs on all five channels, and reads voice notes. Plans differ by volume and by extras such as appointment booking, knowledge base file and link uploads, photo reading and instant replies. Not by language.

The free plan starts at about 175 messages a month with one knowledge base, which is enough to test the assistant against your real questions before paying anything. No card to start.