About multilingual support

Overview

Your AI Agent can communicate with end users in their preferred language. Use multilingual functionality to provide a personalized experience for end users across different regions and languages.

For setup instructions, see Multilingual support setup.

Limitations

Multilingual support has the following constraints:

English is always enabled: English is the default language and cannot be disabled. Your AI Agent always falls back to English when it cannot determine the end user’s language or find content in their language.
Dashboard language: The Ada dashboard is only available in English. Browser translation tools may translate some items inaccurately.
Voice channel support: Voice supports a subset of Ada’s languages. See Supported languages for the current list.

Use cases

Multilingual support enables your AI Agent to serve end users across languages and regions.

Global end user support: Communicate with end users in their preferred language.
Seamless language switching: Allow end users to change languages mid-conversation based on their preference.
Consistent brand experience: Customize Greetings and Handoff messages with manual translations to maintain brand voice across languages.

Capabilities & configuration

Multilingual support provides flexible language handling across channels.

60 supported languages: Communicate with end users in any of Ada’s supported languages across Web Chat and Email. Voice supports a subset of these languages.
Automatic language detection: Your AI Agent detects the end user’s language and responds accordingly.
Language switching: End users can switch languages mid-conversation via autodetect, typing a language name, or using chat settings.
Native response generation: The Reasoning Engine generates responses directly in the end user’s language for every supported language.
Knowledge ingestion across all supported languages: Your AI Agent can ingest and use Knowledge articles in any of the 60 supported languages.
Knowledge localization: Serve region-specific Knowledge content to end users based on language and locale.
Manual translations: Customize translations in Greetings and Handoffs for specific languages.

Supported languages

Ada supports 60 languages with native Reasoning Engine response generation and Knowledge ingestion in every one. All 60 languages are supported in Messaging and Email channels. Voice supports a subset of these languages today; additional languages will be added to Voice over time.

For supported right-to-left languages, web chat is tailored for the best end user experience. This includes flipped UI components such as settings, loading bar, and more.

Language	Messaging	Email	Voice
Afrikaans	Yes	Yes	No
Albanian	Yes	Yes	No
Arabic	Yes	Yes	No
Belarusian	Yes	Yes	No
Bosnian	Yes	Yes	No
Bulgarian	Yes	Yes	No
Burmese	Yes	Yes	No
Catalan	Yes	Yes	No
Chichewa (Nyanja)	Yes	Yes	No
Chinese (Simplified)	Yes	Yes	No
Chinese (Traditional)	Yes	Yes	No
Croatian	Yes	Yes	No
Czech	Yes	Yes	No
Danish	Yes	Yes	No
Dutch	Yes	Yes	Yes
English	Yes	Yes	Yes
Estonian	Yes	Yes	No
Filipino (Tagalog)	Yes	Yes	No
Finnish	Yes	Yes	No
French	Yes	Yes	Yes
German	Yes	Yes	Yes
Greek	Yes	Yes	No
Haitian Creole	Yes	Yes	No
Hebrew	Yes	Yes	No
Hindi	Yes	Yes	No
Hungarian	Yes	Yes	No
Icelandic	Yes	Yes	No
Indonesian	Yes	Yes	No
Italian	Yes	Yes	Yes
Japanese	Yes	Yes	No
Kazakh	Yes	Yes	No
Khmer	Yes	Yes	No
Kinyarwanda	Yes	Yes	No
Korean	Yes	Yes	No
Latvian	Yes	Yes	No
Lithuanian	Yes	Yes	No
Macedonian	Yes	Yes	No
Malay	Yes	Yes	No
Ndebele (South)	Yes	Yes	No
Norwegian	Yes	Yes	No
Polish	Yes	Yes	No
Portuguese	Yes	Yes	Yes
Punjabi	Yes	Yes	No
Romanian	Yes	Yes	No
Russian	Yes	Yes	No
Serbian	Yes	Yes	No
Sesotho	Yes	Yes	No
Shona	Yes	Yes	No
Slovak	Yes	Yes	No
Slovenian	Yes	Yes	No
Spanish	Yes	Yes	Yes
Swahili	Yes	Yes	No
Swedish	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tamil	Yes	Yes	No
Thai	Yes	Yes	No
Turkish	Yes	Yes	No
Ukrainian	Yes	Yes	No
Vietnamese	Yes	Yes	No
Xhosa	Yes	Yes	No
Zulu	Yes	Yes	No

Multilingual behavior

Your AI Agent can understand end user questions in any of Ada’s supported languages, regardless of whether they are enabled in your AI Agent. However, it only responds in the languages that are enabled in the multilingual settings.

Default language

English is the default support language in all Ada AI Agents. You cannot disable it—your AI Agent always replies to English-speaking end users.

English is also the fallback language that your AI Agent uses if it cannot determine what language to use with an end user or if it cannot find Knowledge articles in the end user’s spoken language.

How multilingual knowledge works

Your AI Agent can use Knowledge articles in any of Ada’s supported languages. For non-English Knowledge articles, your AI Agent does the following:

Determines the language the end user is writing in and identifies how best to respond using Ada’s Reasoning Engine.
If your knowledge base contains ingested content in the same language as the end user’s inquiry, the generated response only uses this matched language content.

This means that when multilingual knowledge content is ingested, non-English inquiries are limited to only access corresponding non-English articles. This overrides any Coaching to use an English article instead for non-English inquiries.
If your knowledge base does not contain content in the same language as the end user’s inquiry, the Reasoning Engine falls back to your English Knowledge content and generates the reply natively in the end user’s language.
If the language is not an enabled language, the AI Agent replies in Ada’s default language, English.

Knowledge localization

Ada supports ingesting localized articles in any supported language. This ensures that you can serve region-specific content to your end users. For example, if your knowledge base contains different versions of English articles for end users in different regions, like American users (en-US) versus Canadian users (en-CA), Ada ingests region-specific articles from all of these locales.

Ada serves localized content to your end users based on the language that they speak. For end users speaking en, your AI Agent uses en and all localized en articles (e.g. en-CA, en-US, etc.) when serving them.

When Ada automatically switches languages, it always selects the non-localized variant (e.g., switching to French sets the end user’s language to fr, not fr-CA).

To ensure that localized content goes to the right end users, set availability rules on your localized articles.

To set availability rules for localized articles:

On the Ada dashboard, navigate to Config > AI AGENT > Knowledge > Articles.
At the top of the articles table, click Filter and select Language as the filter option.
Select the locale that you would like to set availability rules for, then click Apply.
At the top-left of the articles table, click on the check box to bulk-select all of the articles you can see in the list.
- You may need to scroll to the bottom and click through each “page” of your table view to continue selecting all available articles on all pages (previously selected articles will stay selected when you click to a new page).
After selecting all articles under this locale, click Set availability in the bar at the bottom of your screen.
Next, set rules so that these articles are only available to end users in this region.

A common setup is to use initialurl to do this. For example, set a rule like initialurl contains '.ca' to ensure en-CA articles only show up to Canadian end users chatting with the AI Agent on your .ca website.
Lastly, click Save to apply these rules.

Now, your AI Agent will always use these localized articles with the right users, even if their language field isn’t localized (i.e. no region).

Channel-specific behavior

Your AI Agent can respond to end users across Web Chat, Email, and Voice, but there are differences in how each channel handles language:

In Web Chat, conversations can happen in any of Ada’s supported languages. You can configure your AI Agent to start the conversation in a specific language. End users 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.
In Voice, conversations can happen in the subset of Ada’s supported languages that Voice currently supports. You can let your end users 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

Multilingual support setup: Configure languages for your AI Agent.
Language switching: Understand how end users can switch languages during a conversation.
Manual translations: Customize translations in Greetings and Handoffs.
Knowledge: Manage your AI Agent’s knowledge base.