Arabic was always the afterthought. That is the whole reason Sawt exists.
Sawt answers the phone, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram for businesses across the Middle East and North Africa — in Levantine, Khaleeji, Egyptian and Modern Standard Arabic, and in English and French. Our team is in Amman.
A missed call here is not a voicemail. It is a customer who called someone else.
Businesses in this region run on the phone and on WhatsApp. A call that rings out at nine in the evening is rarely a message to return in the morning — it is someone who moved on to the next clinic, the next agent, the next shop. And paying a person to answer around the clock is out of reach for most of the businesses losing the most to it.
Voice AI has been able to hold an English phone call convincingly for a while now. Arabic arrived afterwards — and Arabic is not one language. A model trained on Modern Standard Arabic answers a pharmacy in Amman the way a news anchor would. It is understood perfectly, and it is immediately not someone from here.
We would rather show you the number than describe the quality.
Four dialects today — Levantine, Khaleeji, Egyptian and Modern Standard Arabic — and you pick one per agent, alongside English and French.
Dialect quality is easy to claim and hard to check, so we measure it. An automated evaluation synthesizes speech in each dialect, transcribes it back and scores the word error rate. We share those numbers with customers who ask for them. A new dialect ships once it clears the same bar, and not before.
Some of this is not in our favour. Saying it here saves you a week.
Three constraints shape the product more than any feature does, and not one of them is worth keeping quiet:
You cannot buy a local number in most of the region.
Local phone numbers in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt cannot be bought online — not from us, not from anyone. So Sawt meets customers where they already are, on WhatsApp and your website, with no phone bill. A business with a phone system connects it over SIP, and its number stays its own.
Calls and messages come out of the same pool.
A plan is one month of the agent working, not a call allowance with a separate message allowance beside it. A WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram exchange costs 0.3 of a minute, so a shop that never takes a call can spend its entire plan on messages.
For now, you pay in US dollars.
Prices are shown in USD, AED, SAR, JOD and EGP so you can compare. Payment is taken in US dollars through Dodo Payments, our Merchant of Record. Paying in local currency on local cards is coming.
Where your calls are kept, and how to delete them.
Transcripts and call details are stored in our database in London. A recording exists only if you switch recording on for an agent and the caller agrees to it, and it is kept by our telephony provider, Twilio, not in our database. You can play it from the call in your dashboard and delete it there at any time, set a retention period, or switch recording off for a single agent without touching the rest.
What we store and why is in our Privacy Policy, and the two cookies this site sets are in our Cookie Policy.
A short list of true things beats a long list of intentions.
Quiet hours for phone calls, Ramadan schedules and prayer-time handling are planned and not shipped. More dialects are in evaluation. If something here matters to you and is not built, ask — we will tell you where it actually is rather than where it is going.
Our team is in Amman.
Email us and you will reach someone who works on the product.
Sawt is run by Ahmad Nassar. It is not a registered company yet; until it is, he is the business behind it.