Despite the growing use of AI in education, there is still a gap in culturally relevant, ethically aware technology designed for children in Arabic-speaking societies. Most available AI robots follow Western educational frameworks, or lack dialect sensitivity, parental controls and moral reinforcement.
RoboThaqafa fills this gap with an interactive learning companion rooted in Saudi values, heritage and dialects — especially Najdi. It teaches children cultural and ethical values such as cooperation through conversation, proverbs and stories, while a companion app keeps parents involved.
Key features
- Real-time dialect-aware NLP
- Saudi cultural narratives & values
- Child-safe, interactive hardware
- Companion app for parental oversight
- Real-time alerts for parents
- Scales to homes, schools & youth centers
Methodology
Because curated Saudi proverb and dialect datasets do not yet exist, the prototype uses a prompt-engineered approach with open-source Arabic language models.
akhooli/gpt2-small-arabic generates lightweight, fast responses, combined with rule-based dialogue steps for structured interactions.
For comprehension testing, asafaya/bert-base-arabic achieved over 85% accuracy on Arabic QA benchmarks. The prototype was built in Google Colab
with a Gradio interface, as a baseline for future Saudi-dialect and educational fine-tuning.
