Roadmap
What's shipping, what's next, and where Khaos Machine is heading.
Last updated: March 2026
What is Khaos Machine?
Khaos Machine is a desktop application for screenwriters and storytellers. It runs on your Mac, Windows PC, or Linux machine and works with your existing screenwriting software — Final Draft, Highland, Fade In, WriterSolo, or any app that exports standard screenplay formats.
Import your screenplay and Khaos Machine reads it — not just the text, but the story. It identifies every scene, character, and location, then uses AI to analyze dramatic structure, character arcs, dialogue patterns, pacing, mood, and thematic throughlines. The analysis surfaces what's working and what might need attention: a character whose voice shifts mid-script, a second act that loses momentum, a location that carries more symbolic weight than you realized.
But analysis is just the beginning. Khaos Machine gives your characters voices — choosing from a catalog of over 600 AI voices across 25+ providers, including options that run entirely on your machine with no internet connection and no account required. Hear your screenplay read aloud by a full cast. Listen to how dialogue flows between characters. Catch the awkward line that looked fine on the page but sounds wrong when spoken.
Everything stays on your computer. Your screenplay, your analysis, your audio — all stored as plain files in a project folder you control. Cloud AI services are available if you want them, but the application works fully offline with local AI engines. No subscription required. No data leaves your machine unless you choose to use a cloud service.
Khaos Machine is built by Khaos Inc. — a small team that believes AI should support the storyteller's process, not replace it.
The Vision
Khaos Machine is a storytelling harness — a platform that supports storytellers through every phase of their creative process, from first draft to final output, in whatever format their story needs to take.
The platform follows a deliberate progression:
- Analyze — Import your screenplay, understand its structure, surface what's working and what needs attention.
- Listen — Hear your story performed. Listening reveals what reading alone cannot — awkward phrasing, dialogue that doesn't land, pacing that drags or rushes.
- Edit & Iterate — Make changes informed by what you've heard and read in the analysis, then see the impact of those changes immediately. Track how your story evolves across revisions.
- Produce — Take your story beyond the page. Export to the tools you already use — video editors, animation software, storyboard tools — with your cast voices, generated artwork, and scene data intact.
Each phase feeds the next. Analysis informs casting. Casting enables listening. Listening drives editing. Editing triggers re-analysis. Production assets flow into your existing tools and workflows. This is the Writer Feedback Loop — a continuous cycle where every tool in the platform works together to help you make your story better, without ever writing a word for you.
The goal isn't to replace the tools storytellers already know and love. It's to make those tools more powerful by giving them a rich, analyzed, performed understanding of the story — and to support storytellers wherever their story needs to go, whether that's a film, a novel, a comic book, a storyboard, a coloring book, or something no one has tried yet.
✅ Available Now — Analyze
These features are shipping in the current release.
Screenplay Import & Parsing
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Import from Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain, ScriptBuilder (.sbx), PDF, plain text | ✅ Shipping |
| Automatic scene, character, and location extraction | ✅ Shipping |
| Incremental re-analysis — only changed entities are re-analyzed on re-import | ✅ Shipping |
| Multi-provider analysis — compare results from different AI engines side by side | ✅ Shipping |
| Batch analysis — process all scenes, characters, and locations in the background | ✅ Shipping |
AI-Powered Analysis
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Scene analysis — dramatic beats, mood, pacing, themes, emotional arc | ✅ Shipping |
| Character analysis — summary, arc, goals, relationships, dialogue style | ✅ Shipping |
| Location analysis — atmosphere, symbolism, narrative significance | ✅ Shipping |
| Structural signals — inconsistencies, pacing issues, character continuity | ✅ Shipping |
AI Engines
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Ollama (local, free) | ✅ Shipping |
| LM Studio (local, free) | ✅ Shipping |
| OpenAI (GPT-4o, GPT-4o Mini) | ✅ Shipping |
| Anthropic (Claude) | ✅ Shipping |
| Mistral | ✅ Shipping |
| Groq (free tier available) | ✅ Shipping |
| Per-task routing — choose which AI engine handles analysis, speech, images, and more | ✅ Shipping |
Voice & Speech
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Voice catalog — 622 voices across 25+ providers | ✅ Shipping |
| Voice detail — preview, personality tags, emotional range, recommended roles | ✅ Shipping |
| Manual voice casting — assign voices to characters | ✅ Shipping |
| Audition generation — compare different voices for a character | ✅ Shipping |
| Dialogue audio generation | ✅ Shipping |
| Local TTS (KittenTTS, Kokoro, Voicebox, Bark) — runs on your machine, no account needed | ✅ Shipping |
| Cloud TTS (OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Azure, Google, Amazon Polly, Cartesia, Deepgram, LMNT, Gemini) | ✅ Shipping |
Web Dashboard & Tools
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Project browser with status, analysis progress, and file counts | ✅ Shipping |
| Dashboard — scene list, character list, location list, act structure visualization | ✅ Shipping |
| Inspector panel — overview, analysis, and raw data tabs per entity | ✅ Shipping |
| Character Builder — overview, appearance, voice, dialogues, analysis, scenes, relationships | ✅ Shipping |
| Story Player — NLE-style timeline with action/dialogue segments | ✅ Shipping |
| Console — live log viewer with multi-source tabs | ✅ Shipping |
| Settings — AI engine configuration, task routing, autostart, updates | ✅ Shipping |
| Voice Catalog — search, filter, preview, and manage voices | ✅ Shipping |
| Character and location relationship graph | ✅ Shipping |
| Git integration — checkpoint, history, and branch status per project | ✅ Shipping |
Platform
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| macOS installer (.pkg, signed and notarized) | ✅ Shipping |
| macOS menu bar app with daemon management | ✅ Shipping |
| Linux support (.deb / .rpm) with systemd integration | ✅ Shipping |
| Windows support (.zip archive) | ✅ Shipping |
| Auto-update checking | ✅ Shipping |
| Terminal interface (TUI) with import wizard and analysis views | ✅ Shipping |
| All data stored locally — no cloud account required | ✅ Shipping |
🔧 In Development — Listen
The next wave of features completes the listening experience — going from manual voice picking to a fully cast, audible screenplay in minutes.
Automatic Voice Casting
Intelligent voice-to-character matching — Khaos Machine analyzes each character's personality, age, emotional range, and dialogue style from the screenplay analysis, then recommends the best-fitting voices from the catalog of 622+ voices. Accept the suggestions or override with your own picks. The goal: go from importing a screenplay to hearing it performed without manually auditioning hundreds of voices.
Virtual Table Readings
Generate a complete audio performance of your screenplay with cast voices. Every character's dialogue is synthesized in sequence, with proper pacing between lines, scene transitions, and action descriptions. Listen to your entire screenplay — or jump to individual scenes. This is where the feedback loop begins to close: listening reveals what reading alone cannot. Dialogue that looked fine on the page may sound unnatural. A scene that read well may drag when you hear its rhythm.
Audio Generation & Export
End-to-end audio production from your screenplay — generate dialogue audio per character, per scene, or for the full screenplay, then export as audio files you can share. Export individual character tracks, scene mixes, or a complete table read. Share with collaborators, listen during your commute, or use recordings in pitch meetings. Multiple formats and quality levels supported.
Scene Builder
A dedicated workspace for deep scene work — the scene-level counterpart to the Character Builder. Scene text viewing, element-level inspection (action, dialogue, transitions), AI analysis detail, scene audio generation, and metadata editing. Launches from the dashboard when you click a scene.
Media Asset Registry
A unified system for tracking all generated media — auditions, artwork, table reads, scene audio — with metadata, playback, and attribution. Makes every generated asset browseable and playable from one place.
📋 Planned — Edit & Iterate
With analysis and listening in place, the next frontier is closing the loop: making changes to your story and immediately understanding their impact.
Story Editing
Edit your screenplay's structure, dialogue, and metadata directly within Khaos Machine. Not a replacement for your screenwriting app — but a way to make targeted changes (rewrite a line of dialogue, adjust a scene heading, restructure an act break) and immediately see how those changes affect the analysis. Every edit triggers incremental re-analysis, so you see the impact of your changes in real time rather than re-importing and waiting.
Change Tracking & Impact Analysis
When you make a change, Khaos Machine shows you what it affected. Rewrite a character's key dialogue? See how their arc analysis shifts. Move a scene? See the new pacing profile. Merge two characters? See every scene, relationship, and signal that changed. This goes beyond version control — it's story-aware change tracking that understands your narrative, not just your text.
Revision History
Track how your screenplay evolves across drafts — not just what changed in the text, but how the story's structure, character arcs, and thematic signals evolved over time. Compare any two revisions side by side with analysis diffs. See whether a rewrite strengthened or weakened specific aspects of the narrative.
Continuous Feedback Loop
Automatic re-analysis as you work. Khaos Machine watches for changes and re-analyzes affected entities in the background. Signals — structural issues, character inconsistencies, pacing problems — update continuously. Combined with listening and change tracking, this completes the cycle: write → analyze → listen → edit → see impact → repeat.
Multi-Screenplay Projects
Import multiple screenplays into a single project — enabling episodic series (characters tracked across episodes) and draft versioning (multiple drafts in one project, with analysis comparison across revisions). Characters and locations are matched by name across imports; scenes accumulate.
🔭 Planned — Produce
Khaos Machine doesn't exist in isolation. Storytellers already have tools they know — video editors, animation software, illustration apps, writing platforms. The goal is to make those tools more powerful by feeding them rich, analyzed, performed story data.
Video Editor Integration
Export your screenplay as a video editing project — with dialogue clips on character tracks, scene breaks as markers, and generated artwork as placeholder shots. Early prototypes produced Blender VSE projects that created something between an animatic and a table reading — a watchable, listenable rough cut generated entirely from the screenplay and its cast voices.
The intent is to support all major video editors: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Blender. Each export produces a native project file for the target editor, with audio clips, image sequences, and timeline markers placed according to the screenplay's composition data. This lets storytellers take the performed screenplay into their preferred environment and refine it with real production tools.
Animatic Generation
Combine generated character artwork, location imagery, and dialogue audio into scene-by-scene animatics — rough visual sequences that show how a scene plays out. Export as video files or as editor-ready projects. Useful for pitching, pre-visualization, or simply seeing your story in motion before any real production begins.
Multi-Format Story Export
A screenplay is one expression of a story. The same characters, world, and narrative can become a novel, a comic book, a storyboard package, a coloring book, a podcast, or an interactive experience. Khaos Machine's structured story data — characters with appearances and voices, locations with atmosphere and symbolism, scenes with beats and emotional arcs — becomes the foundation for generating output in whatever format the storyteller needs.
This isn't about replacing specialized authoring tools. It's about giving those tools a head start: a rich, analyzed, cast, illustrated understanding of the story that the storyteller can then shape in the medium of their choice.
External Service Integration
Connect Khaos Machine to the services storytellers already use — illustration platforms, voice services, music libraries, publishing tools. The platform acts as a storytelling harness: it understands your story deeply enough to help you get better results from external services by providing them with the right context, the right assets, and the right structure.
🔮 Exploring
Ideas we're researching and prototyping. These may change significantly before shipping.
Project Assistant
A conversational AI assistant that knows your screenplay — ask questions about your story ("What scenes is SARAH in?", "How does the mood shift in Act 2?"), get suggestions, and explore your analysis data through natural language.
Character Chat
Have a conversation with your characters — powered by AI and grounded in the character analysis, dialogue patterns, and story context. Useful for finding a character's voice during rewrites or exploring "what would they say?" scenarios.
Character Artwork Generation
AI-generated character reference images using image providers (DALL·E, Imagen, FLUX). Iterate and compare across providers from the Character Builder's Appearance tab.
Music Generation
AI-generated scene music — mood-appropriate background tracks generated from scene analysis (emotional tone, pacing, genre). Layer underneath table readings and animatics for a more immersive experience.
Provider Onboarding Flow
A guided, step-by-step setup experience for connecting AI engines — auto-detection for local services, OAuth for cloud providers, connection testing. Designed to replace manual configuration entirely.
Collaborative Workflows
Share projects and analysis results with collaborators — co-writers, script supervisors, development executives. Role-based access while keeping data local where possible.
Platform Principles
These guide every feature decision:
- Local first — your screenplay data stays on your machine. Cloud services are opt-in, never required.
- AI is a tool, not an author — Khaos Machine analyzes, reflects, and augments your process. It doesn't write for you.
- The writer decides — every suggestion, casting recommendation, and signal is advisory. You accept, reject, or ignore.
- Your tools, enhanced — Khaos Machine integrates with the tools you already use. It doesn't try to replace them.
- Format freedom — import from any major screenwriting app. Export to any medium. Your story is never locked in.
- Plain files on disk — projects are readable directories, not proprietary databases. Back up with any tool you already use.
- Every story finds its form — whether your story becomes a film, a novel, a comic, or something new, the platform supports the journey.
- Privacy by default — local AI engines work without an account. No telemetry, no analytics, no tracking.
Release Notes
For detailed release history, see the version notes in the menu bar app (About Khaos Machine) or check for updates in Settings → Updates.
Have a feature request? Contact us.