Auto DMs and comment replies in Arabic

Someone comments on your reel in Arabic asking for the price. Until recently we could answer them in English or in one of ten Indian languages, which meant answering a question in a language the person did not ask it in.

Arabic is now on the list. The AI writer drafts the DM and the public comment reply in Arabic, in Arabic script, read right to left, and the language list is twelve: English, ten Indian languages and Arabic.

Where does Arabic work today?

• The flow wizard and the flow builder, for the DM that carries your link.
• The AI-written public comment replies, which is the half everyone else scrolling the post can see.
• The automatic replies that Instoly sends under a comment when you let it answer.
• AI Studio, for captions and scripts, so the post and the reply can be written in the same language.

What we have not covered yet is the quick caption writer, which has no language picker at all, and the mobile app. We would rather say that plainly than let you find it out mid-campaign.

Does right-to-left actually display correctly?

Yes, and this is the part most tools get wrong rather than the translation itself. Arabic runs right to left, so a field built for English will show a sentence with its punctuation stranded on the wrong side, or a phone number reversed inside an otherwise correct line.

Our text fields carry the direction with the language rather than assuming one, so what you type and what your reader receives read the same way round. We built it that way because a DM that displays wrongly is worse than a DM in the wrong language: the second looks careless, the first looks broken.

Which Arabic does it write?

Modern Standard Arabic, which reads correctly everywhere the product is sold rather than belonging to one country. That is a deliberate choice on our part, and it has a cost worth naming: it will always sound slightly more formal than the Gulf or Egyptian Arabic somebody speaks at home.

So we treat the draft as a first version. If your audience is in one city and you know how they actually write, edit the draft into that register. The writer gets you a correct message quickly; the last ten per cent is local knowledge no model has.

We would also keep one person in the loop who reads the language. An automated reply that is grammatically perfect and tonally wrong is still wrong, and the only reliable way to catch that is somebody who would notice it as a reader rather than as an operator.

What does it cost to write one?

One AI writing credit per caption, script or flow, and refining a draft costs the same as writing it. The free plan includes fifty of those a month, Pro a hundred and fifty and Business two hundred and fifty.

The DM itself is separate: one credit per auto DM and one per public comment reply, whichever language it is written in. Arabic does not cost more than English to send, and we set out how the allowances work in the free plan and how credits work.

None of this changes how the flow itself behaves. The trigger, the window and the credits work exactly as they do in English, so if you already run a comment flow, the only new decision is which language the draft comes out in.

How would we set up an Arabic flow?

1. Register the keyword in both scripts. People type the Arabic word and the Roman spelling of it, often in the same comment thread.
2. Write the DM in Arabic and keep the link in Roman letters, because nobody wants a transliterated URL.
3. Keep the public reply short. A long reply in any language reads as a template, and in a second language it reads as a translated one.
4. Say the keyword out loud in the reel, in the language you are speaking it.
5. Send it to yourself before it goes live.

The keyword point is the one people skip, and we skipped it ourselves the first time. A keyword has no language setting, so an Arabic spelling and a Roman one can sit in the same flow and both will match; registering only one of them quietly loses half the people who tried.

Answering in the language someone asked in is not a feature. It is the minimum.

Instoly now answers in the language the question arrived in, which is the whole point of automating the reply rather than the conversation.