Dex is a civic assistant for Irish public life. Most people keep chats on their own device. That is still the default. We are also asking a smaller group of readers to opt in and let us save those civic conversations in the cloud — not for ads, and not for a closed black-box dataset.
The reason sits next door at LeemerLabs: a programme to build a compact open-weight Irish–English model on Qwen3.5-4B-Base, so Irish can work as a working language in software people actually run, including locally. Read the full programme at leemerlabs.com/gaeilge.
Why Dex chats matter for Irish open models
Irish has official status and living communities. Most AI systems still treat English as the default operating language. When education tools, public-service helpers and workplace software are weaker in Irish, people get pushed toward English because the product is better there. Closing that gap needs measured training, not a chatbot skin that answers as Gaeilge once and falls apart on mutation, dialect or follow-up questions.
LeemerLabs’ Gaeilge AI programme is explicit about the target: a ~4.66B open model that can write natural contemporary Irish, handle grammar and dialect, follow instructions, and eventually run on ordinary hardware — with claims gated by shared evaluation, not launch-day slogans. The path is continued pretraining, then Irish-first instruction tuning, then restrained preference work, then GGUF packaging.
Corpora and institutional text matter for that. So does interactive dialogue: how people actually ask about the Dáil, a TD, a Bill, a local authority, or a civic process, and how a careful assistant should answer with sources. Dex is where those Irish civic conversations already happen. Opt-in cloud sync turns that into training signal for an open Irish model, while keeping Dex itself scoped to civic questions.
What we save when you opt in
Without cloud training, your conversation titles and messages stay in this browser’s IndexedDB. Your free pass still stores a first name, email and daily message count on our server so the allowance stays fair.
With cloud training on, we also store opted-in chats in our database, linked to your Dex pass:
- Conversation title, model choice and message turns
- Text and slim tool/card signals useful for interactive training
- Consent timestamp, so we know when you said yes
We do not sell the data. We do not treat the email as marketing consent. Frontier models unlocked by opt-in still refuse coding, homework and general chatbot abuse — the remit stays Irish civic life.
How the data stays under your control
Opt-in is a switch in your Dex free-pass panel. Turn it off and we delete your cloud-saved chats from our servers. Delete my Dex data removes the server profile and clears local history. Cloud rows are tied to that profile and go with it.
For the Gaeilge programme itself, LeemerLabs treats provenance as a hard requirement: public availability is not permission, training and evaluation stores stay separate, and release artifacts are meant to be inspectable — adapters, GGUF builds, bilingual model cards, limitations stated plainly. Dex’s role is narrower: collect only consented civic interaction data, keep it deletable, and put it toward measured Irish open-weight work rather than an opaque commercial scrapheap.
What you get for helping
Cloud training unlocks a higher daily allowance and frontier models on OpenRouter — Nemotron 3 Ultra, Grok 4.5, GPT 5.6 Terra Pro, Kimi K3 and Claude Sonnet 5 — still for civic questions only. That is the ongoing trade: stronger Dex for you, interactive Irish civic dialogue for an open model that should eventually run without a cloud meter.
For readers of this post through the end of July 2026, we are also offering a simple redeem: double your Dex daily limit on the exact email you use with Dex. Use the form below.
Read the Gaeilge programme
Base model, evaluation doctrine, dialect coverage and release promises live on the LeemerLabs page. If you care whether Irish gets a serious open-weight path — not only another English-first API with a language toggle — start there.
July reader offer
Double your Dex limit through 31 July
Enter the exact email you use with Dex. We apply 2× daily messages to that pass until the end of the month — 100 on the free pass, or 200 if cloud training is already on. Every email submitted here is recorded so we can honour the claim.
— The DáilDex team