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Hephon is an AI agency in Dubai (Hephon L.L.C-FZ) that builds Arabic chatbots in Saudi dialect for businesses in the Kingdom. We built the conversational assistant inside the Panda app, used by more than ten million people, and we build the same kind of assistant for Saudi companies on WhatsApp, the web and their own apps.
It reads Saudi dialect as customers write it, Najdi in Riyadh, Hijazi in Jeddah, plus Arabizi and English, without converting it to formal Arabic first. It answers from your live data, stores conversations under the Saudi PDPL with SDAIA’s transfer rules in mind, and hands off to your team when it is unsure.
A customer in Riyadh writes ابي and وش and الحين. A customer in Jeddah writes ابغى and ايش and دحين for the same three ideas. Both write “ruz basmati 5kg” half in Latin letters, and both use words for everyday products that appear in no Arabic textbook. Models trained mostly on Modern Standard Arabic lose accuracy on exactly these messages: in the Panda work we saw models that handled formal Arabic at 95 percent fall to 60 percent on Saudi dialect for the same intents.
We do not translate the customer into formal Arabic before understanding them. We build a set of real messages with you, from your own support history where you allow it, and tune retrieval so that dialect words map to the right products, services and answers.
ابي اسوي كبسة لستة اشخاص الليلة، وش احتاج؟
Najdi: I want to make kabsa for six tonight, what do I need?
ابغى اعرف ايش اوقات الدوام دحين
Hijazi: I want to know your opening hours now.
abi a3rf wain tlbi, mta yosal?
Arabizi: I want to know where my order is, when does it arrive?
ruz basmati 5kg + khubz
Mixed script and English, the way many shopping lists arrive.
Illustrative messages written the way customers write, not real customer messages.
Data protection in the Kingdom is now enforced, and it decides where conversations can be stored. These are the rules we design around.
The Personal Data Protection Law came into force on 14 September 2023 and has been fully enforceable since 14 September 2024, supervised by the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA). Every field the assistant asks for needs a purpose, and customers can ask what is held about them.
Source: Clyde & Co: Saudi PDPL becomes enforceableSDAIA’s regulation on transferring personal data outside the Kingdom allows transfers under conditions, some with a risk assessment first, and sector regulators can require data to stay in Saudi Arabia. We choose where conversations are stored and which model regions are used with you, before launch.
Source: CMS: one year of the Saudi PDPLMarketing messages and calls fall under the PDPL and the rules on spam messages and calls. Consent has to come from the customer directly, and consent buried in a privacy policy does not count. Opt-ins are recorded with the conversation, and opt-outs are honoured on the next message.
Source: Al Tamimi: marketing consent in Saudi ArabiaMeta has charged per template message since 1 July 2025, at rates specific to Saudi Arabia, and it can bill in SAR. Replies inside the 24-hour window after a customer writes are not template messages, so flows that answer rather than broadcast keep the bill small.
Source: Meta: WhatsApp Business Platform pricingGeneral information checked in November 2026, not legal advice.
A chat assistant inside your Android and iOS apps, the way we built Panda’s, with its own SDKs over one chat API so web and voice can be added without rebuilding the brain.
Saudi dialect on your verified WhatsApp number: orders, bookings, account questions and updates, with opt-ins recorded.
A typed retrieval layer over your catalogue or knowledge base, so “khubz”, خبز عربي and “Saudi flatbread” return the same products, and the bot never invents one.
Every answer carries a confidence score; below the threshold the assistant stops and routes to your agents with the conversation and its reasoning attached.
Panda is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest grocery retailers. Its assistant handles product search in Saudi dialect, turns “kabsa for six” into a basket the customer can edit, answers support questions from Panda’s knowledge base and hands off through Genesys Cloud CX. It was built with Panda’s mobile and operations teams and tested only on real, anonymised customer messages.
Read the Panda case studyA focused first build usually lands between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of dollars, depending on how many channels and systems it touches and how clean your data is. We scope a fixed price after a short discovery call, so you know the number before you commit. We invoice in SAR or USD.
Panda went live in eight weeks on both app platforms, at national scale. A smaller catalogue or a single channel usually takes less; the timeline is fixed with the price once we have seen your data.
Yes. We test it on messages in the dialects your customers use, including Riyadh and Jeddah phrasing such as ابي and ابغى, Arabizi, and English mixed in. The Panda assistant works with Saudi dialect as written, without converting it to formal Arabic first.
Yes. Conversations contain personal data, so the Personal Data Protection Law applies, enforced by SDAIA since September 2024. We define the purpose of each field, the retention period and where data is stored before launch. This is general information, not legal advice.
Sometimes, under SDAIA’s transfer regulation, and some sectors require it to stay in the Kingdom. We agree hosting and model regions with you during discovery so the design matches your sector’s rules.
Yes. For Panda we wrote Kotlin and Swift SDKs over a single chat API, so the assistant lives inside the existing Android and iOS apps rather than in a separate window.
It should not, and we design so it cannot: product names, prices and stock come from a live index, not from the model’s memory. When nothing matches, it says so or hands off.
Hephon built the conversational AI agent inside the Panda app in eight weeks. Hephon (Hephon L.L.C-FZ) is an AI agency based in Dubai that builds Arabic chatbots and voice agents for Saudi and UAE businesses.
Our product for retailers
Hephon Commerce
What we learned building Panda’s assistant is now a product for supermarkets: Hephon Commerce answers shoppers in Saudi Arabic and English in your app, on WhatsApp and by phone. It is a separate product; Panda’s own assistant is the custom build described above.
Tell us what fills your team’s day and we will tell you honestly whether AI can take it, and at what fixed price.
