Languages
How the chatbot's language setting works — mirroring the visitor by default, or pinning every reply to one language your customers read.
Each chatbot has a language setting, found under Chatbot settings. It has exactly two behaviours, and which one you get depends on the value.
The two behaviours
| Language setting | What the agent does |
|---|---|
en (English, the default) | Replies in whatever language the visitor writes in. |
| Any other language | Always replies in that language, even when the visitor writes in another. |
So the default is multilingual: a visitor who writes in Spanish gets a Spanish reply, one who writes in German gets German — with no configuration. Pinning the language is the deliberate choice, useful when your brand must answer in one language regardless of how it is addressed.
32 languages can be selected, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, the Nordic languages, Czech, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Your knowledge base does not have to match
Answers are translated at generation time from whatever the retrieved passages say. A knowledge base written entirely in English can answer French questions correctly.
The one thing that does not translate is retrieval. A question in French is matched against your chunks as written, so a French question against English-only content matches less reliably than the same question in English. Two practical consequences:
- Where a language matters commercially, add at least the key pages — pricing, shipping, returns — in that language too.
- An FAQ pair written in the customer's language is a cheap, precise fix for one frequently asked question.
Whether the agent answers at all is still decided by grounding, not by language. When nothing relevant is retrieved the visitor gets the fallback message. The default fallback exists in all 32 languages and follows a pinned language — English for a bot that mirrors its visitors. A fallback you write yourself is sent verbatim, in the language you wrote it in, so write it in the language most of your visitors use, or keep it short and neutral.
What else follows the language
The setting reaches past the agent's own answers. The widget's interface, the opening copy you left at its default, and the framework's fixed replies are all shown in the same resolved language: the chatbot's pinned language when one is set, otherwise the visitor's browser language, otherwise English.
- The widget's own text — header, menus, buttons, composer, the "Online" / "Away — we'll follow up" status line, the status chip shown while a tool runs, the lead-capture form, the rating card and feedback prompt, confirm dialogs, system notes, error messages, the booking card, and the inline search bar. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu render right-to-left.
- Default opening copy — the greeting, the input placeholder, the proactive message, the away note, and the AI-disclosure line, each only while it is still at the shipped default. See Appearance.
- Fixed framework replies — the line after a confirmed booking or ticket, the reply to a decline, the confirm question the agent reads back, and the booking-failure messages. A pinned bot always uses its own language; a bot that mirrors its visitors follows the language of the visitor's yes or no.
- Confirming an action — a visitor can agree or decline in any of the 32 languages. Keep it short: in most of them the agent counts only a yes or a no that is the whole message ("Tak", "はい"), not one buried in a longer sentence. An unclear answer simply makes the agent ask again; it never runs an action on one. See Actions overview.
The built-in translations are machine-produced. Anything you write yourself is shown exactly as written and is never translated, so replacing any default with your own wording is always open to you.
What stays in English
- The dashboard.
- Email — notifications, digests, and transcripts.
- Voice defaults. A call's greeting and spoken disclosure are served as configured; only the synthesised voice and its locale follow the chatbot's language. See Voice.
- The default texts on messaging channels — WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Slack, and SMS.
Where to go next
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