About multilingual support
Communicating with your customers in their preferred language makes them feel like VIPs. Ada lets you do just that! Use your AI Agent’s multilingual functionality to provide that VIP experience to each of your customers.
Supported languages
Ada supports many languages, though support across channels and features vary. There are limitations for how well Ada handles languages in different channels. In the table below:
- Web chat, Email, and Voice indicate whether the AI Agent can speak that language in those channels.
- Knowledge indicates whether the AI Agent can read Knowledge articles in that language. If a language is not supported for Knowledge, articles in that language will not be used by your AI Agent.
- Translation service indicates the service that Ada uses to translate inquiries and knowledge content. This happens when your AI Agent cannot use content in the language that your customer is speaking. Ada uses both Google Translate and LLMs to translate messages. Instead, English articles will be used, with replies translated into the end user’s language.
For supported right-to-left languages, web chat is tailored for the best customer experience. This includes flipped UI components such as settings, loading bar, etc.
Understand multilingual support in Ada
Your AI Agent can also always understand customer questions in any of Ada’s supported languages, regardless of whether they’re enabled in your AI Agent, but should only respond in the languages that are enabled in the multilingual settings.
Default language
English is the default support language in all Ada AI Agents. You can’t disable it — your AI Agent will always be able to reply to English-speaking customers.
English is also the fallback language that your AI Agent will use if it is unable to determine what language to use with a customer or if it cannot find Knowledge articles in your customer’s spoken language.
While Ada offers a variety of languages for communicating with customers, the dashboard is always in English. You can use your browser’s webpage translation tools to view Ada’s dashboard in other languages, but note that this may translate some items inaccurately.
How Ada uses multilingual knowledge
Your AI Agent can always use English Knowledge articles to respond to customer inquiries, because English is Ada’s default language. It can also use Knowledge articles in some non-English languages:
- English
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Spanish
For non-English Knowledge articles, your AI Agent does the following:
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Determines the language the customer is writing in and identifies how best to respond to the customer using Ada’s Reasoning Engine.
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If your knowledge base contains ingested content in the same language as your customer inquiry, the generated response will only leverage this matched language content when responding.
This means that when multilingual knowledge content is ingested, non-English inquires are limited to only access corresponding non-English articles. This will override any coaching to use an English article instead for non-English inquires.
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If your knowledge base does not contain content in the same language as your customer inquiry, the customer inquiry must be translated using either Google Translate or an LLM before the Reasoning Engine can generate a response.
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If the language is not an enabled language, the AI Agent will reply in Ada’s default language, English.
Translation service
Sometimes, your AI Agent must translate customer inquiries or Knowledge content before it can respond. This happens when your customer is speaking a non-English language, but Ada cannot use Knowledge content in a matching language.
In these situations, Ada uses either Google Translate or a native LLM to translate inquiries and Knowledge content:
- For languages supported by Google Translate, customer inquiries will be translated into English before Ada’s Reasoning Engine generates a response that will then be translated back into the source language again by Google Translate before Ada responds.
- For languages supported by native LLM translation, customer inquiries in non-English languages are assessed and responses are generated directly in the same language by a non-English LLM model. This results in improved understanding and accuracy in the generated non-English response.
Channel-specific multilingual limitations
Your AI Agent can respond to customers in many languages in Web Chat, Email, and Voice — but there are limitations in some channels:
- In Web Chat, conversations can happen in any of Ada’s supported languages. You can also configure your AI Agent to start the conversation in a specific language. Customers can change the language using the web chat widget settings or by speaking in a different language.
- In Email, conversations always start in English. End users can switch to another language by replying in that language but there are limitations for switching to some languages.
- In Voice, conversations can happen in a limited subset of Ada’s supported languages. You can let your customers choose the language they would like to use at the start of a conversation. You can also configure your AI Agent to start the conversation in a supported language by:
- Assigning a default starting language to a phone number or SIP address used to receive a phone call
- Passing the language identifier in the SIP header if the AI Agent is using SIP to receive calls
- Passing the language identifier value to the end user profile API