As of v0.9 PMB has no per-language packs in its core. A language works
because the multilingual embedder already knows it - not because someone
hand-wrote a list.
Why most languages just work
Recall - language-agnostic
The embedder (paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2, 50+ languages) maps
same-meaning text to nearby vectors across languages. A Russian query finds
an English fact, no translation.
Intents & extraction - English anchors (warm)
Classified by English semantic anchors; the embedder projects your language
next to them, so “was sind meine Ziele” lands on the same goals_query
anchor as “what are my open goals”.
Cold lexical path - self-compiling (ALD)
As the warm tier classifies your messages, it logs which n-grams co-fired
with which anchor and distils the high-precision ones into
$PMB_HOME/lang/auto.yaml. Your common phrasings then classify cold, at
regex speed - generated from your own traffic, not a pack.
Check that your language works
pmb warmup # load the embedder once
pmb recall "<a query in your language>" # should surface the right facts
cat "$PMB_HOME/lang/auto.yaml" # grows from your traffic over days
Honest limits: ALD only learns while the warm daemon runs and needs some
traffic; CJK (no spaces) stays warm-anchor-only; exact top-1 is weaker for
zh/ja (still strong in top-3).
If your language is weak: swap the embedder
The real lever now - not writing a pack:
pmb config set embedding.model BAAI/bge-m3 # broader language coverage
pmb reindex
pmb daemon restart
Escape hatch: hand-seed a pack
The file-based pack mechanism still exists to bootstrap a language’s cold path
before ALD has traffic. Opt-in and additive - with no pack files PMB behaves
exactly as shipped.
pmb lang list # shipped templates (de, es, fr) + what's enabled
pmb lang enable de # copy the template to $PMB_HOME/lang/de.yaml
pmb daemon restart
pmb reindex
