Why most chatbots fail on "3ayez 2 burger"

A large share of WhatsApp orders in Egypt arrive written like this: "3ayez 2 burger w batates". That is Arabic, specifically spoken Egyptian Arabic, typed in Latin characters, with digits substituting for Arabic letters that have no Latin equivalent. It is usually called Franco-Arabic, or Arabizi. Most chatbots handle it badly, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of tuning.

What is actually happening in that message?

The digits are letters. In Franco-Arabic, numerals were adopted because they resemble the shape of Arabic letters that Latin script lacks:

• 3 stands for ع (ayn), so "3ayez" is عايز, meaning "I want".
• 7 stands for ح, so "7abibi" is حبيبي.
• 2 stands for ء (hamza), so "2ana" is أنا, "I".
• 5 or kh stands for خ, and 9 is sometimes used for ص.

So "3ayez 2 burger" is genuinely ambiguous: the 3 is a letter, and the 2 is a quantity. A system that treats all digits as numbers reads this as an order for three or two of something. A system that treats all digits as letters loses the quantity entirely.

Why standard Arabic support does not solve it

"Arabic support" almost always means Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic script, the register of news broadcasts and official documents. Franco-Arabic differs on three axes at once: the script is Latin, the dialect is Egyptian rather than Standard, and the spelling is unstandardised. The same word may be written "3ayez", "3ayz", "aiz", or "ayez" by four different customers, all of them correct.

There is no official orthography to normalise against, because Franco-Arabic was never standardised. It emerged from keyboards that couldn't type Arabic, and stayed because it is fast.

Why it matters commercially

A misread order is not a degraded experience, it is a wrong order: the wrong item, or the wrong quantity, sent to a kitchen. And customers do not switch registers to accommodate software. Someone who types in Franco-Arabic will keep typing that way, and a system that can't follow simply loses the order.

What handling it properly requires

1. Detecting the register before parsing, whether Franco-Arabic, Arabic script, or English, because the same characters mean different things in each.
2. Resolving digits by position and context rather than by a fixed rule, so a digit before a menu item reads as a quantity and a digit inside a word reads as a letter.
3. Matching loose spellings to menu items, since customers will not spell dish names the way the menu does.
4. Replying in the register the customer used. Answering Franco-Arabic in formal Modern Standard Arabic reads as stiff and faintly robotic.

Redood's agent detects and replies in Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian colloquial, English, and Franco-Arabic, matching whichever the customer used. It is the capability we consider most distinctive about the product, and the hardest to add later.