Building an Arabic-First Business Product: Lessons from Lisan

When Noor Alasadi described Lisan to Entrepreneur Middle East in March 2023, he started with the work of checking an Arabic draft. A spelling suggestion was one part of it. The UAE startup was also trying to recognise grammatical, morphological and stylistic issues and help writers check things such as names and quotations. That starting point shaped the business question. Would the tool help an individual finish a draft, or could it also help an institution apply its own editorial rules across many writers? Alasadi’s published Entrepreneur Middle East interview

This profile draws on that published interview and Lisan’s later product documentation. The Future 100 report identifies Alasadi as co-founder and CEO and lists Lisan in Dubai. Lisan’s company page continues to list Dubai as one of its operating locations. The focus here is its UAE product story and the choices visible in the public record. The interview is a record of what Alasadi said in 2023. The product pages show what Lisan describes today. Neither offers an independent account of how a particular UAE customer uses the product. Future 100 profile Lisan company overview

Start with the writer’s decision

A proofreader has to decide what kind of problem it is seeing. A typo might call for a straightforward replacement. A sentence that reads awkwardly may need a suggestion that the writer can assess. A proper name may be unusual and still correct. If a tool treats all three as interchangeable errors, the user has to spend time working out whether the proposed change is safe. Alasadi’s early interview made those distinctions part of the product discussion, separating spelling, grammar, morphology, meaning and style, among other categories.

Take an illustrative UAE example. An organisation is drafting an Arabic event notice that includes an English venue name, a person’s title and a quotation from an earlier statement. A writer may want to fix an agreement error while retaining the official spelling of the venue and leaving the quotation intact. If software offers to rewrite the entire sentence, it could make reviewing those changes harder. A suggestion that identifies the affected words and explains the issue gives the writer something specific to evaluate. This example describes a potential workflow, rather than a test of Lisan or an observed customer use.

Lisan’s WriteX page now describes Arabic checks for features such as hamza, case endings, morphology and diacritics. It also presents different ways to apply changes, including one word, a category or a bulk correction. For English it describes a separate option to rewrite a sentence in one action. These are stated product choices, and their relevance depends on the work. A writer cleaning up a routine internal note may value speed. An editor approving an official statement may want to review selected changes individually. WriteX product documentation

Give Arabic its own interface decisions

Lisan’s company overview says the platform is designed with right-to-left use in mind. Direction affects what the user can comfortably review. A paragraph can contain Arabic prose, a date, a URL and an English product name. The editor needs to see where the change starts and ends and how it looks in the output. The work can extend to controls, comments, cursor movement and document exports. A screenshot of a clean Arabic paragraph says little about how a document behaves after several rounds of edits.

For a bilingual UAE team, the useful test is the complete document. Try a heading, an address, a numbered list and a reference that mixes scripts. Change one line, reject another suggestion and see how the final file reads after sharing it with a colleague. If the approved output is a formatted letter or a web page, review it there as well. Those checks address a different question from whether an AI model can produce fluent Arabic text. They show whether staff can finish the actual work in the environment they use.

A historical Dubai Consumer Rights Instagram reel contains a bilingual branded service graphic. It gives a separate Dubai example of how an institution can present information in two languages. It has no connection to Lisan. A team producing material of this kind needs to check whether the terminology, layout and intended meaning carry through in each language. The placement of a title or a brand name can matter as much to the finished notice as the correction of an individual word.

Move from a personal tool to an institutional workflow

In the 2023 interview, Alasadi described a freemium offer for individuals and a shared-revenue arrangement with partners for business and government customers. That was his description of the model at the time. It gives a useful view of the commercial choice. An individual could try the tool on their own writing. An institutional customer might need a channel that could introduce the software, define what it does and support it through deployment. The interview does not establish the commercial terms for any named UAE customer. Alasadi on Lisan’s early business model

Lisan now markets WriteX to institutions and describes support for organisational terminology and editorial rules. That changes what a buyer can ask during a demonstration. A writer may want to know whether the tool catches a grammatical issue. A communications lead may also want a standard way to write a department’s name and an approved form of address. An IT or governance reviewer may want to understand access and what happens to drafts. The early choice of buyer therefore has implications for the product as well as for sales.

The product choices also create decisions for the organisation buying it. A term may have one approved spelling in a brand guide and another in a quoted source. A staff member may have permission to change the main text but need approval to change a template. Before treating a suggestion as a rule, decide who sets the rule and what happens when it conflicts with the source. Test that with the people who will sign off the material. The buyer should know how to maintain its editorial decisions after the implementation team moves on.

Separate a programme example from evidence of performance

Dubai Future Foundation’s government AI case study collection acknowledges Lisan AI among the participating companies. That is independent confirmation of participation in a UAE public-sector programme. It does not establish how often a specific customer used WriteX, what it paid or how the product performed on its documents. The programme record helps place the company in a UAE setting while leaving those commercial and technical questions open. Dubai Future Foundation government AI case studies

The 2023 interview and current product pages include performance claims. A founder’s description and a vendor’s demonstration can help a buyer select what to test. To assess the software for a real team, use a defined group of representative drafts and qualified reviewers. Note where suggestions catch real issues, where they miss them and where they propose changes that should be rejected. Give special attention to changes that affect names, quoted text, numbers and meaning. An error in one of those categories can matter more than several missed stylistic improvements.

Check the work around the suggestion as well. Time how long staff spend on a draft from first review to an approved output, and document any extra checking they do. If the tool finds more issues while giving editors a longer list of unsuitable changes, the number of flags alone tells you little. If it handles formal correspondence well but struggles with the language in customer messages, keep the results separate. A team can decide to use it for a narrower purpose and learn from that use. The public record for this profile supplies no independent measurements of these outcomes.

What the case says about an Arabic-first business

Alasadi’s 2023 account began with specific kinds of writing errors and described different commercial routes for individual and organisational users. Lisan’s current materials show how those questions have widened to include the interface and the rules institutions want to apply across documents. The continuity is in the job the company describes. An Arabic writer needs to inspect and approve changes in a form that makes sense to them. The institution needs to decide which changes it is willing to accept and who owns that decision.

For another UAE founder, the next useful question is which part of the work a buyer will pay to improve. If the problem is the time it takes to check routine Arabic correspondence, test a narrow set of drafts. If the problem is inconsistent terminology across a large team, include rules and exceptions in the trial. Where the issue is mixed-script formatting, test the output before widening the offer. In each case, let the people who approve the material define what counts as an acceptable result.

One practical way to see the difference is to follow a draft from the first suggestion to the final approval. Record which changes the writer accepted, which ones an editor overruled and whether the exported version matches what both reviewed. That sequence can reveal whether the product needs a better language suggestion, a clearer control or a different place in the organisation’s workflow. It also gives the buyer and the founder a common record when they discuss what to build or buy next.

WriteX’s public examples also show what an institutional rule can look like in the interface. One changes a transliteration to match a dictionary, and another changes a title to the form expected by a style guide. Lisan says teams can manage Arabic and English rules separately. For a buyer, the important distinction is between correcting a language error and applying a house preference. A name may be entirely valid in a source document while differing from the organisation’s preferred spelling. The test is whether a reviewer can recognise the type of suggestion, preserve a justified exception and see what will be published. That is a more specific requirement than asking whether the software knows Arabic. WriteX’s style-guide examples

For an editor, the answer can determine where the tool belongs. A department might use bulk corrections for low-risk drafts and require individual review for official titles, quotations and figures.