DialectOS Roadmap

This document outlines the planned direction for DialectOS. It is a living document — priorities may shift based on community feedback and contributor interest.

🎯 Vision

Become the most accurate open-source engine for Spanish dialect detection and adaptation. We focus on depth over breadth: 25 Spanish variants with high-quality keyword detection, register classification, and vocabulary adaptation rules.

📅 Short Term (Next 1–3 Months)

Detection Accuracy

• Reduce cross-dialect false positives — "chévere", "pana", "guagua" appear in multiple dialects; weight context and co-occurrence signals
• Grammar feature detection — Detect voseo ("vos" + verb conjugations), leísmo/laísmo/loísmo, yeísmo distinctions ✅ v0.2.0
• Confidence calibration — Better score thresholds so low-confidence input falls back to neutral rather than guessing
• Labeled benchmark corpus — Hand-label 500+ text samples per dialect for accuracy testing

Register & Style

• Finer register granularity — Split "slang" into "street", "youth", "regional casual"; split "formal" into "business", "academic", "legal"
• Register-aware translations — Pass register signal to LLM providers (GPT-4, Claude) for tone-matched output
• Gender-neutral register — Formal register should default to inclusive language (elles, latine, -e/-x endings where appropriate)

Adaptation Rules

• Grammar adaptations in manage-variants — Vosotros→ustedes, voseo verb endings, subjunctive variations
• Regional phrase replacements — "Qué lo que" → "¿Qué tal?" for formal contexts, etc.
• Number/date/currency formatting — MM/DD/YYYY for es-US, DD/MM/YYYY for most others, currency symbols

📅 Medium Term (3–6 Months)

Provider Quality

• Dialect-specific prompts for LLM providers — Feed dialect keywords + register markers into GPT-4/Claude prompts for better translations
• Provider quality benchmarks per dialect — Measure which provider (DeepL, GPT-4, LibreTranslate) handles each dialect best
• Translation memory / caching — Cache previously translated strings keyed by (text, dialect, register) to reduce API costs

Community & Data

• Community keyword contributions — Accept PRs adding verified slang/formal terms per dialect
• Dialect research citations — Link each keyword to a source (academic paper, native speaker survey, regional dictionary)
• Coverage dashboard — Visual map showing which dialects have strong vs weak keyword coverage

📅 Long Term (6–12 Months)

Beyond Text

• Speech-to-text dialect detection — Classify Spanish dialect from audio samples
• Real-time chat adaptation — WebSocket pipeline that rewrites incoming Spanish messages to the recipient's preferred dialect

Quality & Trust

• Human evaluation pipeline — Native speakers rate translation quality per dialect; feed scores back into provider selection
• Adversarial robustness — Test detection against code-switching (Spanglish, Portuñol), typos, and social media shorthand

🗳️ How to Influence the Roadmap

1. Vote with reactions — Add 👍 to issues you care about
2. Open an issue — Describe the feature and why it matters
3. Start a discussion — Share your use case in GitHub Discussions
4. Contribute code — The fastest way to get a feature shipped

✅ Recently Completed

Unreleased (post v0.3.0)

• Dialectal dictionary overhaul — Stripped 500 padded entries, added 58 high-variation concepts with genuine per-dialect variants; 833 total concepts (333 with real variation)
• Optional variants — DictionaryEntry.variants now optional; pan-Hispanic entries have no variants block
• New semantic fields — medicine_health, family, finance fields added alongside existing 11 fields (14 total)

v0.3.0 (2026-04-27)

• dialectos validate — Standalone translation validation with quality gates, semantic check, and output judge
• Translation corpus — Dialect-indexed JSONL storage for translations and corrections with CLI commands
• Public benchmark suite — 205 adversarial samples across 25 dialects and 13 categories with benchmark runner
• GitHub Action — Composite CI action for PR translation validation with multi-dialect matrix
• Auto-glossary from corrections — Suggestion engine + dialectos glossary suggest/diff commands
• Automated tests across 7 packages

v0.2.0 (2026-04-27)

• Grammar detection — Voseo, leísmo/laísmo/loísmo, yeísmo with exact bigram matching
• Semantic backstop — Negation preservation, keyword overlap, structural parity checking
• Translation memory — Persistent cache with TTL, LRU eviction, and atomic writes
• Adversarial hardening — 125 samples, torture tests, public demo hardening
• LLM primary provider — Dialect-specific prompts, Anthropic API, LM Studio certification
• Certification harness — Incremental runner, adversarial certification, customer reports

v0.1.0 (2026-04-20)

• 25 Spanish dialects — Expanded from 20 to 25 (added es-GQ, es-US, es-PH, es-BZ, es-AD)
• Formal vs slang register differentiation — detectRegister(), --register CLI flag, MCP register param
• Comprehensive dialect adaptations — 200+ vocabulary rules in manage-variants covering all 25 dialects
• Adversarial fixture corpus + CI lane
• Provider capability negotiation
• Semantic drift quality gate
• Versioned checkpoint schema with migration
• Reliability telemetry + health reports
• Provider chaos harness
• Operator policy profiles (strict/balanced/permissive)

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Last updated: April 2026