Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
An AI agent's languages live on the Languages page under Settings. Generated replies are fully supported in 80 languages, and others may work without a guarantee, so the model is almost never the constraint. Your content and your fixed replies are.
One thing to check before you start. If you took AI agents - Advanced before 10 March 2026, your workspace still uses the earlier layout, where these settings sit on the agent's Settings tab instead of on a page of their own. If the steps below do not match what you see, that is why: let us know and we will walk you through the version you have.
The default language cannot be changed
You choose it when you create the agent, and after that it is fixed. Every other language is an addition on top of it. So the choice made in the first five minutes of setting up an agent is the one you live with, which is a reason to set it to the language most of your customers write in rather than to English out of habit.
Add a language
- In the AI agents workspace, select the agent.
- Click Settings in the sidebar and select Languages.
- Click Add language and pick the language. The list is split into Automatic translations available and Manual translations only.
- For a language in the first group, select Use automatic translations for this language.
- For one in the second group, or if you would rather translate yourself, select Duplicate replies from another language and choose which language to copy from. This is worth doing when you already have well-built replies elsewhere, and worth skipping on a brand-new agent that has nothing to copy.
- Click Add.
Automatic and manual are two different jobs
With automatic translations, the system replies and dialogues are translated by AI and the language is active straight away. You cannot deactivate it afterwards, only delete it.
With manual translations you supply every translation yourself, and the language stays Inactive until you activate it by hand. The Status column on the Languages page tells you which of the two you are looking at.
Automatic translation covers 29 languages, and it always translates from your default language. That is the practical reason to get the default right first: every automatic language inherits whatever is there, including the clumsy sentence nobody got round to fixing.
One limit explains what a customer may report as a fault: the agent reads the native script only. Russian written in Latin letters is not recognised as Russian, however readable it looks to a person.
Activating publishes everything at once
Activating a manual language publishes all active replies in it in one go. So finish and check the replies first: the moment you activate, customers see whatever is there, including the half-translated ones.
Do that check on the failure path in particular. What the agent says when it cannot help, and what it says while handing over, are the replies most likely to still be in the default language, and they are read at the worst possible moment.
Deleting a language deletes its replies
Delete a language and all replies and templates in it go with it. Reporting history and conversation logs are kept, but the replies are not, and re-adding the language later does not bring them back. The confirmation asks you to type the language name, which is your last chance to stop.
Decide beforehand what those customers get instead: another language, or straight through to a person.
Check the tone, not only the words
Formal and informal address, and how direct a refusal sounds, differ between languages. A translation that is literally correct can be noticeably rude or oddly stiff, and only a speaker of that language will tell you.
A short message falls back to your default
Language is detected from what the customer writes, so a reply of two or three words does not carry enough text to detect anything with confidence. When that happens the agent uses its default language, which is why a Dutch conversation can turn into English halfway through. That is expected behaviour rather than a fault.
Automatic translation is a decision, not a default to accept
Turning it on widens your reach and means replies go out in a language nobody on your team has read. That is fine for straightforward answers and uncomfortable for anything about money or entitlements, so decide it per agent rather than once for everything.
Recheck when content changes
Adding articles in one language improves the agent there and nowhere else. Where you maintain several, the agent's quality drifts apart language by language unless somebody looks.
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