From Family Recognition to Humour: Unpacking What Makes AI Seem More Human

Consumers in the UAE highly value personalisation and accurate understanding when interacting with human-like smart assistants, according to a recent survey by Researchscape International commissioned by Yango. The survey aimed to identify the key features that UAE residents seek in an AI assistant.

The most important human-like traits for respondents include recognising individual family members and responding accordingly (66%), accurately understanding various accents, speech patterns, and intonations (63%), and providing proactive chat support and assistance (54%). Additionally, 43% of participants appreciated a sense of humour, while 34% valued the ability to understand and respond to whispered speech.

Yango App's Yasmina has advanced capabilities to cater to these needs by identifying the user's gender and providing age-appropriate content for children. Yasmina also excels at telling culturally relevant jokes that resonate with locals. When asked to tell a joke, it responds with one from its carefully curated collection.

A majority of survey respondents speak Arabic at home, with Khaleeji (40%), Egyptian (32%), and Levantine (27%) being the most common dialects. Yasmina understands major Arabic dialects and speaks Khaleeji fluently. It can also switch seamlessly between Arabic and English during conversations, maintaining natural and fluid dialogue.

Yasmina's unique conversational skills are powered by innovative natural language understanding, speech recognition, and speech synthesis technologies. A proprietary large language model (LLM) extensively trained on diverse datasets enables Yasmina to maintain engaging, fun, and consistent dialogues that feel like talking to a real person.

"At the core of Yasmina lies a powerful large language model, which enables it to continuously learn and enhance its knowledge and skills. We have improved Yasmina's ability to generate natural language by exposing its LLM to diverse linguistic contexts that capture the intricacies of regional dialects, idioms, and cultural references," said Samer Mohamad, Yasmina Regional Director for MENA at Yango.

Currently available within Yango Play—an AI-powered entertainment super app combining video streaming, music, and mini-games—Yasmina will soon appear in more devices and apps. This expansion will extend its use cases and open up new opportunities for engaging interactions.

The findings are based on an online survey conducted between February 7th and 20th, 2024, among 500 participants from the UAE. The study was commissioned by Yango and carried out by Researchscape International.