RTL support for our ChatGPT website chatbot

A chatbot without RTL support is basically useless for Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi - In addition to a couple of other languages. If you don't know what RTL means, it's an acronym and it implies "Right To Left". Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi aren't written from left to right the way we write English. Instead it's written from right to left. This have drastic effect on your UI, and you need to explicitly inform your UI with the RTL HTML construct that you intend to render characters from right to left.

In addition to the above HTML rtl attribute, you also have to accommodate for RTL flow of text. This is not a trivial task, since your UI needs to be created from the start to render correctly from right to left. This has consequences for margins, paddings, alignment of buttons, etc. Applying RTL is incredibly simple basically, but unless you've accommodated for RTL when designing your UI, it's incredibly difficult to get it right. I have participated in projects where the entire frontend had to be re-created because of not thinking about RTL from the start.

AINIRO have RTL ChatGPT support

Today we released a new version of our ChatGPT chatbot, where one of the crucial new features is RTL support. This implies that as you embed your chatbot on your website, you simply check of a checkbox to have it rendered right to left. Below is a screenshot illustrating the process.

This allows you to create ChatGPT website chatbots that answers in Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi, without violating the natural flow for reading in these languages.

Diversity matters

At AINIRO we take diversity seriously. It's almost a cliche these days to say this out loud, but we believe in diversity. There are roughly 1 billion Arabic speaking human being on the planet today, 100 million speaks Farsi, and some 50 million speak Hebrew. This implies that 95% of the web is not accommodating for more than 1 billion people. Not taking people's cultures seriously is not only disrespectful, but I suspect also not particularly smart from a business point of view.

Aria, Tage, and me come from a minority background ourselves. We're Norwegians, and more importantly we have a lot of Sami blood in our veins. Norwegian is a language spoken by roughly 5 million people, and Samis have been a suppressed minority in Norway up until recently, and some would argue still are suppressed - So we're obviously passionate about this ourselves. Below you can see an image of Samis wearing their traditional clothing. Up until quite recently, speaking Sami was illegal in Norwegian schools, and Sami people were being illegally sterilised by the government who considered Sami people to be "inferior people". For those not acquinted with the Sami culture, it's the Scandinavian indigenous people.

We would be very disappointed if our chatbot technology didn't allow for responding in Norwegian, or in Sami for that matter, and I suspect the same is true for people coming from RTL cultures. Hence, starting from today, we are proud to announce that our ChatGPT website chatbot technology now supports RTL. Psst, in case you wonder if our ChatGPT chatbot supports Sami ... 😊