"Rony" to adapt news stories in 109 languages into Kurdish

Artificial intelligence robot "Rony" will soon start scanning news reports in 109 different languages, and adapt them into Kurdish for human editors to work on, Botan International announced on Saturday.

"Botan International's IA robot Rony with command of Kurdish will start working in 2023!" the announcement said.

"The robot, encoded by KeyoChali, is able to scan news reports in 109 languages, adapt them into a Kurdish news format, and send them to editors. Rony learns Kurdish reporting through analysis of interventions by journalist Mirad Bayram. Rony will do tests for at least six months. We are delighted to announce Rony's birth on the birthday of the robot's creator KeyoChali."

Botan International, an educational institution based in Turkey's Kurdish-majority provinces of Diyarbakir and Sirnak, aims to contribute to Kurdish journalism and Kurdish press freedom in partnership with Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Rony's creator Yehya Lezgin Chali, or KeyoChali, is the co-founder and CEO of Ovanya, a private company based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. A team of data scientists and software engineers work at Ovanya to develop AI solutions, and the company's KOCR is a service that detects and extracts text and data from scanned documents. KOCR is the first Kurdish optical character recognition software.

Murad Bayram is a journalist based in Diyarbakir, who has worked for many news outlets, including bianet, Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera International, as reporter, editor and columnist. A member of PEN International, Bayram is the author of stories collected in "Belki Isev Binive" ("Maybe Tonight She Will Sleep"), has edited 46 books in Kurdish, and translated six books.

The Kurdish name of KeyoChali's AI robot "Rony" means "Light" in English.