https://arab.news/72453
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman exchanged Eid greetings with regional leaders on Monday, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
The crown prince received calls from UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Eid Al-Adha started on Saturday and will end on Tuesday.
RIYADH: Projects to preserve and restore important religious and historic sites in Madinah have brought a growing number of visitors to the area.
The work by the Madinah Region Development Authority includes ongoing restoration of the Battle of the Trench site and surrounding areas, where followers of the Prophet Muhammad dug a deep trench to fortify themselves against attack in 627 C.E.
A place that holds deep religious and historical significance for Muslims, the redevelopment includes restoring several mosques and other significant sites.
The authority is also redeveloping the Miqat of Dhu Al-Hulaifah, where the Prophet Muhammed entered the ritual state of Ihram before performing the Umrah pilgrimage. The initiative is focused on expanding the mosque’s facilities and improving services.
Over the past year, several Madinah landmarks have been enhanced with modern amenities and new guide services using digital technologies. Other upgrades include the installation of pedestrian facilities around the city’s central area and near the Prophet’s Mosque, such as electric vehicle access and a pedestrian path to Quba Mosque, and landscaping and public amenities.
The Rua Al-Madinah Project is a major development featuring an extensive tunnel network and numerous luxury hotels which will contribute to the target of increasing the holy city’s hospitality capacity to 30 million visitors by 2030.
The Al-Matal Project, another new initiative, features integrated tourist and recreational facilities built into the mountainside of the Al-Jamawat neighborhood.
The schemes will enrich the Madinah visitor experience, a key objective of Saudi Vision 2030.
RIYADH: The Fog Walk promenade, at more than 2,400 meters above sea level in Saudi Arabia’s southern Asir region, has become a major attraction for those wanting to beat the heat this summer.
Located in the Al-Namas governorate, it is 7 km in length and has panoramic views of the Tihama plains coastal area, the Saudi Press Agency reported recently.
The region’s climate is typically foggy and mild in summer, with temperatures rarely going above 30 degrees Celsius, while other parts of the country are averaging above 40.
There are also towering mountains and dense forests for visitors to enjoy.
The promenade has wide paths, seating and rest areas, as well as food trucks, cafes and stalls selling handicrafts and traditional food from the region.
The annual Summer of Al-Namas festival includes folk art performances, sports competitions, an International Sculpture Forum, and a range of open cultural evenings.
Recent developments from the local authorities at the promenade include night lighting, improved green spaces and additional support services to promote the tourism industry.
The Asir Development Authority aims to attract 8 million tourists to the region by 2030. A SR1.3 billion ($346.5 billion) entertainment complex is being developed and slated for completion in 2025.
Its offerings will include arcade games, theme park rides, cinema, indoor golf course, bowling, and go-kart track.
As a part of Vision 2030, an additional SR6 billion will be invested into the region’s tourism industry. The Asir Development Authority is aiming to increase this to SR9 billion.
RIYADH: The Chinese Embassy in Saudi Arabia hosted a reception on Thursday in Riyadh’s Cultural Palace to mark the 98th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.
“The Chinese and Saudi people have a friendship and connection of more than 2,000 years,” said Zhu Je, the armed defense attache at the embassy.
He added that the two nations celebrated this week the 35th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, which began on July 21, 1990.
In his opening remarks, Zhu highlighted the growing relations between the two nations. “China has become Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner; Saudi Arabia is China’s largest trading partner in the Middle East,” he said.
President Xi Jinping and Saudi Arabia’s leaders have worked on developing a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership since 2022, Zhu said.
“In 2024, by instructions of the Saudi leaders, His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman visited China, Sino-Saudi military relationship was upgraded to strategic level.
“Chief of general staff, His Excellency Gen. Fayyadh Al-Ruwaili, led series of delegations to China, achieving solid results in multiple cooperation fields,” he said.
Zhu said the Chinese armed forces was created as a part of the country’s struggle for national unification and independence.
He said over the past 98 years, “led by the Chinese Communist Party and supported by the people, it has won more than 200 significant battles and defeated more than 10 million enemies.”
This had made a “great contribution to the independence, safety and development of the country, having become a strong force to deter aggression and threats.”
On the region, Zhu said China wants to play a constructive role in promoting peace and stability. “China calls for (an) immediate and sustained ceasefire in Gaza, opposes the deportation of the Gaza people.
“China, together with Saudi Arabia advocate that the Palestinian issue should be resolved comprehensively, justly and lastingly on the basis of the two-state solution,” he said.
There were several ambassadors and defense officials at the reception, including Chinese Ambassador Chang Hua, who hosted the event alongside Zhu.
Zhu added: “I would again express our sincere gratitude to the Saudi leaders and people, especially the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Interior, the National Guard and other security institutions.”
PARIS: Saudi Arabia’s National Physics Team won four medals at the 55th International Physics Olympiad in Paris which ran from July 17 to 25, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Friday.
Mazen Al-Shakhs won silver, while Hussein Al-Saleh, Mohammed Al-Arfaj, and Ali Al-Hassan each won bronze at the IPhO.
The latest medal haul has raised the Kingdom’s overall tally at this annual event to seven silver, 23 bronze, and 22 certificates of appreciation.
A total of 425 students from 85 countries competed in the contest this year.
Saudi Arabia’s achievement was a result of intensive training for the students by the King Abdulaziz and His Companions Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity, or Mawhiba, the SPA reported.
Support was provided by the Ministry of Education, and sponsorship by Saudi Aramco.
The IPhO is an annual competition for high school students, with each national delegation allowed up to five student competitors plus two leaders.
Similar to other Olympiads, member countries take turns hosting the competition. It was first held in Warsaw, Poland, in 1967, and last year in Isfahan, Iran.
In 2026, the host will be Bucaramanga, Colombia.
In the event’s 58-year history, China has emerged as the most dominant, with Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the US completing the top five.
DHAHRAN: In a world racing toward automation, Klemen Simonic believes the most natural interface is also the most enduring: the human voice.
As founder and CEO of Soniox — a cutting-edge speech-to-text platform — Simonic is betting that voice-powered technology will drive the next wave of digital innovation.
And in a country like Saudi Arabia, where smartphones dominate daily life and a young population is hungry for digital solutions, the potential is hard to ignore.
Soniox, which Simonic launched five years ago, offers speech recognition, transcription and real-time multilingual translation in more than 60 languages.
Unlike many competitors, it delivers ultra-fast, token-level outputs in milliseconds — a critical advantage for live assistants, wearables, bots and smart speakers.
But Simonic’s journey toward building the company began long before the rise of generative AI.
“I started in programming development right after high school, and I was invited to join the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, one of the best institutes in this part of Europe,” he told Arab News.
“I was working there with Ph.D. students and postdocs on machine learning, natural language processing, dependency parsing, tokenization, tagging and entity extraction.”
That early exposure led him to two internships at Stanford University in 2009 and 2011, where he worked alongside top researchers in AI. “I wanted to join Google to work on these cool things,” he said.
After an internship there in 2014, Simonic was courted by both Google and Facebook — ultimately joining the latter in 2015 to help build speech recognition systems now used across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Today, his company is focused entirely on voice AI, and its promise goes beyond convenience.
With privacy and compliance built in — including SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA readiness — Soniox is already being used in hospitals, call centers and emergency rooms where clear, accurate transcription can be a life-saving tool.
“We have many healthcare customers using our API in emergency rooms where real-time AI interpretation can bridge communication gaps that human translators sometimes cannot, especially with complex medical terminology,” said Simonic.
Saudi Arabia represents a particularly compelling market for the company’s ambitions. With more than 90 percent smartphone penetration and a population where 70 percent of people are aged under 35, the Kingdom is fertile ground for voice-enabled technologies.
The widespread adoption of government-developed platforms like Tawakkalna during the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the Kingdom’s reliance on mobile-first services.
“Data and artificial intelligence contribute to achieving Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030; this is because, out of 96, 66 of the direct and indirect goals of the vision are related to data and AI,” according to the Saudi Data & AI Authority.
The Kingdom’s communications and IT sector is now worth more than $44 billion — 4.1 percent of gross domestic product — and expanding quickly with strategic investments in cloud computing, automation and smart infrastructure.
Although Soniox does not yet have a team on the ground in the region, the company sees significant interest from Saudi organizations exploring AI-powered transcription and customer service tools.
Simonic said there are pilot programs in countries like Portugal and interest from companies in Saudi Arabia looking to improve call center and transcription services.
And while Arabic remains one of the more complex languages for voice AI, Simonic sees both the challenge and the opportunity. Many of Saudi Arabia’s rural communities speak dialects rich in cultural nuance — languages that are often excluded from mainstream datasets.
This environment offers fertile ground for Soniox’s technology, which strives to “enable all languages, so everyone in the world can speak and be understood by AI.”
Simonic’s team, primarily based in Slovenia, is committed to expanding language support to make the technology more inclusive, even in markets where none of the developers speak the local tongue.
Soniox is also designed with flexibility in mind. Businesses can integrate its API without storing any audio or transcripts, ensuring tight data control. For individual users, features like encrypted transcripts and a summarizing tool enhance productivity — even for the tech-averse.
“My mom is not very tech-savvy, but she uses our app to build her grocery shopping list,” Simonic said. “That was not the original purpose, but it shows how technology can evolve in ways we didn’t expect.”
In July, Soniox launched a new comparison tool that allows developers and businesses to benchmark different speech AI providers using their own voice samples and real-world data.
It is another step toward transparency and broader adoption — especially in regions like the Gulf, where choosing the right solution can hinge on performance in diverse linguistic contexts.
“The tech morphs, but the human voice remains the most intimate and effective way we communicate,” Simonic said.
As Saudi Arabia pushes forward with its digital transformation under Vision 2030, technologies like Soniox may find their voice amplified — not just as a tool for productivity, but also as a bridge between language, innovation and access in a rapidly changing world.
