The Journal

Labiba

The Best Arabic OCR I Tried Wasn't an OCR Engine

AI RAG LiteLLM

18 Jul

The Best Arabic OCR I Tried Wasn't an OCR Engine

While building Labiba AI, a RAG assistant for Zain's Legal Affairs department, the pipeline kept falling apart at step one: reading scanned Arabic letters. Here's how a locally hosted vision model ended up replacing the OCR engine entirely.

Your RAG Isn't Dumb, Your Chunks Are: Fixing Long-Document Retrieval

AI RAG LiteLLM

17 Jul

Your RAG Isn't Dumb, Your Chunks Are: Fixing Long-Document Retrieval

Users kept telling me the same thing about Labiba AI: "I know the answer is in this document, but it can't find it." The information was always near the end of a long, multi-page letter. Here's why that happens and how parent-document retrieval fixed it.