Glossary

Multilingual support

For a phone assistant, multilingual support means that it can hold conversations in several languages.

  • Also: multilingual phone assistant, language switching, caller language detection
On this page
  1. In practice
  2. An example
  3. A common misunderstanding
  4. At Call0

There are two forms. Either one language is fixed per phone number or agent, or the assistant detects the caller’s language and switches during the call. The second form is more convenient but more error-prone: an English company name inside a German sentence must not trigger a change of language.

The number of supported languages says little about quality. What matters more is how well recognition and voice work on the phone in each language, including dialects, names and addresses. The knowledge also has to exist in that language or be translated reliably. For day-to-day operation it also counts in which language summaries arrive, so that the team can read them.

In practice

First decide which languages your callers really speak, and test each of them with a native speaker. Check the greeting, the most frequent questions, names and addresses. Define the language in which the assistant answers the phone and whether it may switch. Translate the knowledge as well as the greeting; otherwise it answers in the other language with gaps. And settle the handover case: if nobody on the team speaks Turkish, the assistant should not promise a callback in Turkish.

An example

A travel agency near the French border receives calls in German and French. The assistant answers in German. A caller starts in French, it switches language and takes her enquiry about a round trip. When she mentions the name of a German hotel, it stays in French. The summary reaches the team in German, with a note that the customer speaks French and that the colleague who knows the language should call back.

A common misunderstanding

A long list of languages is easily mistaken for even quality. There are clear differences between languages, in recognition and in voices alike. Everything that comes after the call is underestimated too. An assistant that understands many languages is of little use when confirmations, callbacks and documents are only possible in one. Better to offer a few languages in which the entire process works.

At Call0

A Call0 agent can speak 13 languages. The website and the dashboard are available in 12 languages.

Languages on the facts page