Digital Harf: A Clinically Integrated Multimodal AI System for Pervasive Arabic Speech and Language Therapy

Abstract:Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Arabic-speaking countries face compounded barriers to effective speech and language therapy: a shortage of qualified specialists, limited service reach beyond urban centers, and a near-total absence of culturally grounded digital therapy materials. We present Digital Harf, a pervasive, multimodal AI platform that extends clinician-led speech and language therapy into the home. The system integrates three therapeutic modules - language therapy, speech intelligibility, and picture description - within a unified workflow that adapts to each child's performance over time. To address the critical shortage of Arabic therapy content, we introduce an Agentic Synthetic Data Engine (ASDE) that automatically generates culturally relevant images, prompts, and language tasks guided by explicit therapeutic and cultural criteria. Expert evaluation with 13 licensed Speech-Language Pathologists yielded a 90.1% clinical acceptance rate for ASDE-generated content without any manual curation or selection, and strong ratings for cultural and linguistic alignment across the full platform. Digital Harf demonstrates that AI-driven therapeutic systems can be built from the ground up for underrepresented linguistic settings, treating cultural grounding as core infrastructure rather than an adaptation afterthought.

Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.27212 [cs.HC]

(or arXiv:2607.27212v1 [cs.HC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.27212 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.