Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
An AI agent can work in several languages, and it can only answer as well as your content in each of them. Adding a language is safe; activating it is the moment that counts.
How it works
The agent detects the language the customer writes in and replies in it. For languages that support automatic translation, your replies and dialogues are translated by AI. For the rest you supply the translations yourself. Generated answers come from articles in that language either way.
Nothing is visible until it is active
A language you add, and any reply you create in it, stays hidden from customers until it is set to active. That is the most useful property of the whole feature: you can add a language today, spend three weeks getting the content right, and let nobody meet the half-finished version in the meantime.
Decide which languages before you start adding
List the markets the agent will serve and the languages those markets use. The answer affects your copy and sometimes the structure of your dialogues: standardised German across Germany, Austria and Switzerland is one decision, separate variants per country is another, and they cost very different amounts of work.
Then put them in order. Two things decide which language to do first: how much of your existing work you can reuse in it, and how much of your message volume it covers. Start with the one that moves the most.
The workflow that saves the most work
Add the language and choose to duplicate the replies from a language you already have; duplicating a reply brings the dialogue inside it along. Translate those duplicates. Then set the language to active, which is the point at which customers can reach it, and start on the next one.
Working from a duplicate is what makes the second language cheaper than the first, so build the first one properly. The same holds for automatic translation, which always translates from your default language: every language you add that way inherits whatever is in the default, good or clumsy.
When there is nothing to duplicate
On a new agent, or a language too different from what you have, add the language and write new replies with a new dialogue for each. Set each reply to active as you finish it: customers still cannot reach the language, and the active flag becomes your progress list showing what is ready and what is not. Activate the language last.
Generated answers need articles
Where a language is switched on but the knowledge base is only half translated, the agent has little to work from and falls back to saying it cannot help. Enabling a language does not create coverage, it exposes how much you have. Take your ten most common questions and confirm each is answered by an article in that language. That check takes twenty minutes and predicts the outcome accurately.
Fixed replies need translating too
Greeting, system replies, handover text. An agent that greets in Dutch and apologises in English reads as broken, and the system replies are exactly the ones nobody remembers to translate.
Matching degrades before the language does
A procedure that fires reliably in English can miss in another language, even when the customer's question is a faithful translation. The translated phrasing lands closer to a different procedure. Nothing is broken and no reply is wrong; the agent picked the wrong one to follow.
The fix is not more translation but wider wording: expand the use case name and the reason for request so they carry the phrasings customers use in each language you support. Test with real sentences from each language rather than translations of your English test.
Detection is not perfect
Short messages, mixed languages and technical terms confuse it. Let the customer switch language explicitly, and make sure a wrong detection is recoverable rather than final.
Handover must match
Passing a Dutch conversation to a group that answers only in English solves nothing. Route by language, or restrict the agent to languages you can staff.
Fewer languages, done properly
Two languages the agent handles well beat five where three produce apologies. Add a language when its content is ready, not when the setting is available.
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