Meet Habibi – the Chinese AI uniting 20 Arabic dialects in a Middle East first

South China Morning Post · Feb 28, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Chinese researchers have released the world’s first open-source text-to-speech (TTS) model that unifies more than 20 Arabic dialects in an AI framework, a move poised to expand China’s technological influence in the Middle East, according to analysts.Led by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s X-LANCE Lab – one of China’s top audiovisual and language processing research entities – the model is named Habibi, meaning “my dear” in Arabic.In presenting their findings, the research team spearheaded by Chen Yushen described the project in a paper as “the first open-source framework for unified-dialectal Arabic speech synthesis”.“To the best of our knowledge, research on unified-dialectal Arabic TTS is absent, not to mention an open-source framework,” the authors said in the paper, “Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis”. It was published last month on arXiv, an open-access repository that is not peer-reviewed.01:12World’s first ‘fully biomimetic embodied intelligent robot’ debuts in ShanghaiWorld’s first ‘fully biomimetic embodied intelligent robot’ debuts in ShanghaiHabibi has the “zero-shot” ability, meaning the model can easily clone a voice by using just a short reference audio clip, without prior explicit or extensive training. This allows applications in highly efficient and on-the-fly scenarios.