Media
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Description
Add tashkeel (diacritical marks) to Arabic text. Learning Arabic? Then you know the problem: real-world Arabic — news sites, Wikipedia, blogs, song lyrics — is written without tashkeel (the harakat that mark short vowels), so there's no way to tell how an unfamiliar word is pronounced. Tashkeel fixes that in one click. Highlight some Arabic text and click the Tashkeel icon: the text is rewritten in place with full diacritics. Click with nothing selected and the whole page gets tashkeel, with results appearing on screen as they are computed — a full news homepage takes just a few seconds. WAYS TO USE IT • Click the toolbar icon — tashkeel for the selection, or the whole page if nothing is selected. • Right-click → "Add tashkeel", or "Add tashkeel to the whole page". • Keyboard shortcut: Alt+Shift+N (⌥+Shift+N on Mac). • "Remove tashkeel" restores the original text exactly. • Works inside text boxes too — Gmail compose, comment fields, online editors. • Google Docs or Word Online? Pages like these can't be edited by extensions, so Tashkeel includes a paste page: right-click the toolbar icon → "Open paste page", then paste, click, and copy the vocalised text back. PRIVATE AND FAST • Everything runs on your device, using a neural network (TensorFlow.js with a WebAssembly engine). Your text never leaves the browser — no server, no account, no tracking, and it works offline. • The extension loads only when you invoke it. It does not run in the background or touch pages you don't use it on. • Running it again on the same page (say, after an infinite-scroll site loads more articles) processes only the new text, in a fraction of the time. The model is not perfect, but it performs really well on Modern Standard Arabic — the register of news, Wikipedia and formal writing. KNOWN ISSUES • "I don't see the Tashkeel icon in my toolbar" — Chrome sometimes hides newly installed extensions. Click the puzzle-piece icon at the top right and pin Tashkeel to the toolbar. • Google Docs and Word Online can't be edited in place (that's a Chrome limitation, not a Tashkeel one) — use the built-in paste page instead. Tashkeel is free, always will be, and open source: github.com/GiladAmar/Tashkeel. If you're curious how a Chrome extension runs a neural network with TensorFlow.js, take a peek. If it helps you, you can support further development at paypal.me/GiladAmar. If not, no worries. Credit where it's due: the diacritization model is Shakkala by Ahmad Barqawi (github.com/Barqawiz/Shakkala), a character-level BiLSTM for Arabic text vocalization, used here under the MIT license and converted to run in the browser with TensorFlow.js. Thank you — it's a really cool and original use of machine learning.