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Support multiple languages in the same AI Agent

Understand multilingual content 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.

important

While Ada offers a variety of languages for communicating with customers, the dashboard is always only in English.

Supported languages​

Ada’s multilingual functionality supports the following languages:

  • Albanian

  • Arabic

  • Belarusian

  • Bosnian

  • Bulgarian

  • Burmese

  • Catalan

  • Chinese (Simplified)

  • Chinese (Traditional)

  • Croatian

  • Czech

  • Danish

  • Dutch

  • English

  • Estonian

  • Filipino (Tagalog)

  • Finnish

  • French

  • German

  • Greek

  • Haitian Creole

  • Hebrew

  • Hindi

  • Hungarian

  • Icelandic

  • Indonesian

  • Italian

  • Japanese

  • Kazakh

  • Khmer

  • Korean

  • Latvian

  • Lithuanian

  • Malay

  • Norwegian

  • Polish

  • Portuguese

  • Punjabi

  • Romanian

  • Russian

  • Serbian

  • Slovak

  • Slovenian

  • Spanish

  • Swedish

  • Tamil

  • Thai

  • Turkish

  • Ukrainian

  • Vietnamese

For supported right-to-left languages, the chat is tailored for the best customer experience. This includes flipped UI components such as settings, loading bar, etc.

Understand how multiple language support works​

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. 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.

With multilingual support enabled, your AI Agent does the following:

  1. Determines the language the customer is writing in.

  2. Identifies how best to respond to the customer using Ada's Reasoning Engine.

  3. Replies in the customer's language (using Google Translate) if the language code matches an enabled language. If the language is not an enabled language, the AI Agent will reply in English.

Turn on multiple language support in your AI Agent​

To enable multilingual functionality in your AI Agent, follow these steps:

  1. On the Ada dashboard, go to Customization > Languages.

  2. Under Available Languages, select any languages you want your AI Agent to be able to send messages in, in addition to English, which is always enabled.

Enable only the languages you need​

Tempted to enable every language you possibly can? Hold off! Consider the following best practices:

  • You should only enable languages that your agents speak. Otherwise, you might hand off customers to agents who can't help them.

  • For each language you enable, you should have someone on your team who speaks that language. That way, they can review conversations in the Conversations view to help gauge the AI Agent's performance.

Set your AI Agent's starting language​

The starting language is the language your AI Agent starts web chats in. If most of your customers speak the same non-English language, you can choose to set it as your AI Agent's starting language. Your AI Agent will automatically begin every conversation in this starting language, but of course, customers can still change the language at any time. The starting language for all new Ada AI Agents is English.

Add the language script to Embed2​

You can change the AI Agent's starting language by making a small addition to the Ada Embed2 script. You might already be familiar with it, but if you need a refresher, check out our Embed2 documentation. Let’s take a look at how to set up an AI Agent's starting language to French.

  1. Find the default embed script on your webpage. It should look like this:

    <!-- <head> -->
    <script
      id="__ada"
      data-handle="yourbothandle"
      src="https://static.ada.support/embed2.js">
    </script>

  2. To set the AI Agent language, add the following window.adaSettings snippet between the head and the script of the basic Ada Embed2 script, and add the language format code from the ISO 639-1 language format.

    <script>
      window.adaSettings = {
        language: "fr",
      }
    </script>

    Your revised Ada Embed2 script should look similar to this:

    <!-- <head> -->
    <script>
      window.adaSettings = {
        language: "fr",
      }
    </script>
    <script
      id="__ada"
      data-handle="yourbothandle"
      src="https://static.ada.support/embed2.js">
    </script>

Understand how your AI Agent initially determines the customer's language in Ada's web chat​

Your AI Agent adheres to an order of operations when determining the chat language. It proceeds sequentially through the following criteria to determine the opening language:

  1. Embed2 - If the Embed2 script defines a default language, the AI Agent will always launch in that language. If the language is not set in the Embed2 script, it moves on to check the customer's browser language.

  2. Browser - The AI Agent launches in the customer's browser language. If the AI Agent cannot detect the customer's browser language, it launches in English.

  3. English - If both a default language isn't defined in the Embed2 script and a browser language can't be detected, the AI Agent launches in English.

important

Regardless of how the AI Agent determines the language to use, it can use only the languages you’ve enabled in its settings. Be sure to select each language you want to support with your AI Agent.

Understand how your AI Agent initially determines the customer's language in other channels​

Other channels don't have as much information available for your AI Agent to determine the customer language. In these cases, the AI Agent uses Ada's language detection feature to determine the language the customer's input is in.

Understand how customers can change the chat language​

Customers can change the chat language using one of the following methods:

  • Autodetect - If a customer types a message of at least three words and 20 characters in an enabled language, the AI Agent will try to identify the language and change the language of the chat.

    note

    The three word minimum doesn't include common words, such as "and," "the," etc.

  • Language name - If a customer types the exact name of an enabled language (e.g., "French" or "Français") into the chat field, the AI Agent will change the chat language accordingly. This must be an exact match — typos or the name of the language within a longer message (e.g., "Do you speak French?") will not trigger a language change.

  • Chat settings - The customer can click the Settings icon to access the chat window settings in Ada's web chat. They can then click Change language and select one of the languages you have enabled in your AI Agent.

Why didn't my AI Agent switch languages?​

In some cases, it might seem like your AI Agent should have automatically switched languages, but didn't. Here are some reasons why that might happen:

  • The languages have a lot of overlap. Some languages are so similar that your AI Agent can't switch back and forth between them. These language pairs include:

    • Malay and Indonesian

    • Simplified and Traditional Chinese

    • Spanish and Catalan

    • Croatian and Serbian

  • The language model has a limitation.

    • Once your AI Agent is set to some languages, it can't automatically switch to another language. These languages include:

      • Haitian Creole

      • Filipino (Tagalog)

    • The language model isn't confident about identifying some languages, so it won't automatically switch to them. These languages include:

      • Catalan

      • Croatian

      • Haitian Creole

      • Malay

      • Norwegian

      • Slovenian

  • The customer is using Latin characters for a language with a different writing system. For languages that have non-Latin writing systems, we do not support recognizing Latin dialects derived for those languages (e.g., Zhuyin or Pinyin for Chinese).

  • The customer didn't use diacritics. We use training data that contains diacritics, so your AI Agent won't understand input that doesn't also include them. For example, the model predicts that "với" is in Vietnamese. However, if the customer writes "voi" (without diacritics), the model predicts that it's in Italian instead.

Work with custom translations​

For the majority of conversations that take place in Ada, your AI Agent automatically translates all content. The exception occurs when you want to customize the translations in any piece of your AI Agent's basic dialog.

Within any piece of basic dialog, there are two translation methods available to you:

  • Automatic translation – When customers ask questions in different languages, your AI Agent automatically sends your English content to Google Translate, and then responds with the translated content.

  • Custom translation – Manually add your own translations. Adding a custom translation to a basic dialog overrides automatic translation for that dialog in that language.

View and modify translated content for a piece of basic dialog​

For pieces of basic dialog that don't have custom translations, you can get a preview of how Google will translate the content. Then, if you want to modify the translation, you can do so.

  1. Ensure you have enabled all the languages that you want to serve translated content for in your AI Agent. For more information, see Turn on multiple language support in your AI Agent.

  2. On the Ada dashboard, go to Content > Basic dialog, then open the piece of dialog you want to see translated content for.

  3. From the list of your AI Agent's supported languages, select the language you want to see content for.

    The non-English languages can have two different headers above them, indicating the types of translations you'll see:

    • Automatic Translations - Translated content comes directly from Google Translate and hasn't been modified at all.

    • Modified Translations - Translated content contains custom translations and/or modifications to Google's default translations.

    If you see that the language you want to use isn't in the list, click Manage Languages to enable that language in your AI Agent.

  4. If the dialog only has automatic translations, click Modify Translation. The blocks become editable.

    If the dialog already has custom translations, the blocks are editable as soon as you switch to that language.

  5. Modify the translation as required and click Save. If the dialog didn't have any custom translations before, the language now appears under Modified Translations in the list of supported languages for this Answer.

Remove a custom translation from a piece of dialog​

To delete a custom translation from a piece of dialog:

  1. On the Ada dashboard, go to Content > Basic dialog, then open the piece of dialog you want to see translated content for.

  2. From the list of your AI Agent's supported languages, select the language you want to delete the custom translation for.

  3. Click Delete modifications. Then, in the confirmation window that opens, click Delete.

    Once you delete a custom translation, your AI Agent will go back to serving automatically translated content to customers.

Have any questions? Contact your Ada team—or email us at .