The English-only AI era is ending
For most of the LLM era, Pakistani users have had to interact with AI in English — even when their native language is Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi or Sindhi. The reason was simple: training data. Large language models learned overwhelmingly from English-language internet text, and their performance in Pakistan's native languages was, until recently, embarrassing. That has changed dramatically in the last 18 months.
Where things stand in 2026
GPT-4-class, Gemini-class and Claude-class models now handle Urdu and Pashto with surprising fluency on most everyday tasks — writing, summarising, translating, answering questions. They still struggle with three things: highly idiomatic colloquial Urdu, technical / clinical Urdu vocabulary, and rare regional dialects. But the gap to English performance has narrowed from roughly 40-60% accuracy a few years ago to 85-95% on most general tasks.
What is driving the improvement
- More multilingual training data. Open-source efforts and platform-led data collection have dramatically improved Urdu corpus quality.
- Targeted fine-tuning. Pakistani research groups and product teams have begun publishing Urdu-fine-tuned variants of major open-source models.
- Cross-lingual transfer. Modern LLMs are now able to transfer knowledge between languages more effectively, so improvements in English bleed into Urdu performance.
- Right-to-left rendering and Urdu UX. Less glamorous but equally important — the interface layer for Urdu has matured.
What this means for Pakistani businesses
Three concrete shifts. First, customer service bots can now operate in Urdu with confidence. The era of "press 1 for English, 2 for Urdu" is being replaced by genuine bilingual conversation. Second, content marketing in Urdu is now viable at scale — AI-assisted translation produces drafts a human editor can finish in minutes rather than hours. Third, voice interfaces in Urdu are becoming usable, opening up a population of users who never typed comfortably and were structurally excluded from the first wave of digital products.
What this means for AI search
AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity increasingly serve Pakistani users in their preferred language. A school principal asking "Pakistan ke liye sabse acha school management system kon sa hai?" is no longer a hypothetical query — it is a real one, returning real answers. Pakistani businesses that publish authoritative content in Urdu will be cited in those answers. Those that only publish in English will be invisible to a fast-growing slice of buyers.
What LetTech is doing here
Every LetTech product is built bilingual from day one. LetPsyc supports Urdu prompts and culturally adapted reporting. EduTrack's parent app and reports are Urdu + English. LetTech's WhatsApp bot service defaults to Urdu + English. We treat Urdu as a first-class language, not a "localisation" afterthought. We strongly recommend every serious Pakistani technology company do the same.
Written by the LetTech team. LetTech is a Pakistani technology company focused on solving real-life problems with AI & technology — solving real-world problems with AI. Read more about LetTech or explore our product family.