Sakhr Software, a leader in advanced Arabic speech and language solutions, has announced that it has acquired Dial Directions, a leading provider of voice-entry technology for mobile devices and services.

With Dial Directions’ network-based speech recognition technology and mobile applications expertise, Sakhr Software is set to deliver a new wave of technologies to enable real-time speech to speech translation for Arabic.

For nearly two decades, Sakhr Software has been pioneering and developing the world’s richest knowledge base for Arabic natural language processing (NLP).

Sakhr Software has delivered many industry firsts for Arabic NLP, including optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation (MT), and search and information mining, said a compny statement.

More than 100 customers, including the US Department of Defense, US Department of Homeland Security, and the US Department of Justice, use Sakhr Software’s technology to address Arabic language needs.

By delivering industry-leading and proven products, Sakhr Software has achieved outstanding financial performance, generating more than $25 million in profits since 2007.

The acquisition of Dial Directions will further expand Sakhr’s technology portfolio and market leadership in Arabic language and speech solutions.

"Sakhr’s mission is to develop technology to enable communication across the Arabic language barrier,” said Steve Skancke, president, Sakhr Software US.

“At Dial Directions we found exceptional talent and unique technology, accelerating Sakhr’s ability to develop and deliver the most advanced solutions for our customers and partners,” he pointed out.

"BBN tapped Sakhr Software US to participate in Darpa's Gale project, because we believe that Sakhr has one of the most advanced Arabic NLP technologies," remarked Dr. John Makhoul, chief scientist, BBN Technologies.

"Sakhr's Arabic expertise has been important in helping BBN push the state of the art and achieve the highest accuracy levels for automatic translation from Arabic to English year after year. We are looking forward to what ground-breaking advances Sakhr will bring to our team in the future," he added.

In 2008, Sakhr Software US and Dial Directions partnered together to develop language application technology for mobile, cloud-computing environments.

The companies collaborated to develop a first of its kind open speech-to-speech mobile translation application for the U.S. government and business customers.

The solution enables English and Arabic speakers to speak their native language, hear the audio translation, and read the text translation – all with an iPhone or Blackberry.-TradeArabia News Service