Secretary / LifeOS — Arabic personal knowledge
An open-source personal assistant, adapted to work properly in Arabic: text direction, dates, mobile gestures.
Self-initiated
- Role
- Arabic adaptation and development of an independent fork
- Upstream
- LifeOS, open source (nbramia/LifeOS, GPL-3.0)
- Stack
- Python · web UI · browser tests
- Status
- In development
- Link
- Code on GitHub
01The problem
Real Arabic support is more than translated buttons. A message mixing Arabic and English has to stay readable, a date has to say “two hours ago” with Arabic grammar, and the side menu has to open from the right side.
02The approach
The repo started as my own project, Secretary. I then moved it onto LifeOS, an open-source personal assistant, as an independent fork, keeping Secretary's history on an archive branch. The rule: every Arabic behaviour gets a test that proves it works in the browser.
03What exists
Done: Arabic chat copy and a language picker, right-to-left and mixed-direction messages, an Arabic home page that keeps the saved language, direction-aware mobile menu gestures, the journal's emotion wheel in Arabic and English, and relative dates with Arabic grammar. Plus harnesses that measure Arabic retrieval and tool use on synthetic test data.
04Where it stands
The work is covered by 76 focused tests: 64 browser scenarios and 12 for the retrieval harness. The repo says plainly what's missing: real-model quality in Arabic hasn't been measured, and the Android app and Arabic voice aren't part of this fork.