Managing languages in a conversation bot

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This functionality is part of AI agents.

Conversation bots include language settings that allow you to specify a default language and let you configure them to speak in multiple languages for an improved customer experience. Using these settings, you can select a language for a single-language bot or create multilingual bots.

This article includes the following topics:

• Supporting single-language bots
• Supporting multilingual bots

Supporting single-language bots

By default, your bot language is set to your account's default language.

To specify a default language for a bot

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
2. Click Manage conversation bots.
3. Click the bot you want to update.
4. Click the Settings tab.
5. Expand the Language section, and use the drop-down menu to select your language.
   Note: For consistency and ease of comprehension, the default language selection should match the language used to write your conversation.

Supporting multilingual bots

If your customer base uses multiple languages for communication, there are several settings throughout Suite you can configure, including:

• Activating automatic translation for a bot
• Translating help center articles
• Translating conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
• Customizing automatic message translations (Support Professional and above, Suite Growth and above)
• Testing multilingual bots

Activating automatic translation for a bot

In your bot settings, you can activate a feature that automatically translates the text elements in a conversation bot’s answer steps and in standard responses configured in the behavior tab, including:

• Bot messages
• Options
• Button text and links
• Carousel card titles
• Image descriptions
• Variables

These elements should be created in the bot's default language. The bot uses the language setting to determine the source language when translating text.

If the conversation bot is embedded in a help center, the bot text is translated into the customer's selected help center language. If the conversation bot is embedded in your website, the bot text is translated into the customer's selected browser language.

You can override automatic translations of bot messages in answer steps and standard responses by creating custom message translations.

Note: Activating automatic translation in a bot does not impact text elements managed outside of the bot settings, such as help center articles. You can, however, use dynamic content to translate some of these elements in Zendesk Support. See Providing multiple language support with dynamic content.

To activate automatic translation

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
2. Click Manage conversation bots.
3. Click the bot you want to update, then click the Settings tab.
4. Expand the Language section and use the drop-down menu to select your default language.
5. Select Translate bot messages to activate automatic translation.
6. In Select languages for automatic translation, specify the customer-side languages you want to include in the automatic translation process. You can open the drop-down menu and scroll through the options or begin typing to filter the language options.

   You can test the auto-translated bot responses at this point, or after publishing the bot.

7. Publish the bot after changing the language.

Translating help center articles

You can suggest help center articles in a conversation to direct customers to information that may help them self-solve their questions.

To offer help center articles in multiple languages, you’ll need to activate those languages in your Guide settings, then add translated versions of those articles to your help center.

For more information, see Configuring your help center to support multiple languages and Localizing help center content.

Translating conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace

After taking over a conversation from the bot, agents can use the native translation feature in the Zendesk Agent Workspace to communicate with customers and other agents across multiple languages. This feature is activated by default for all customers using Agent Workspace but is only available for agents with a Chat seat.

For more information, see Translating conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Customizing automatic message translations (Support Professional and above, Suite Growth and above)

If you find that the automatic translations for some bot messages don’t meet your standards – for example, by translating product and brand names, using incorrect pronouns, or using inaccurate phrasing – you can replace them with custom translations.

Custom message translations are manually written versions of the text in the message fields of a bot’s standard response or answer steps. Translation customization is not available for other automatically translated text elements (such as option or button text).

To customize a message in a particular language, that language must be:

• Included in the automatic translation settings.
• Added to the list of available languages in Zendesk Support.

Custom-translated bot messages are sent to end users based on their detected language. If a message field does not have a customized translation in the end user’s detected language and that language is included in the automatic translation settings, it will be autotranslated.

Note: Custom translations do not work with generated variations. If you create a custom translation for a message field, generated variations for that field will be turned off. If you turn on generated variations for a custom-translated field, that field will be auto-translated instead.

To create a custom translation for an answer in bot builder

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
2. Click Manage conversation bots.
3. Click the bot you want to update, then click the Answers tab.
4. Select the answer you're creating a custom translation for, then click the step you want to update.
5. Under the bot message, click Manage translations.

   

6. Click the pencil icon for the language you want to customize, then enter the custom text.

   

   Repeat this step for additional languages if needed.

7. Click Done. You can test the custom bot responses at this point, or after publishing the bot.
8. Publish the bot to apply the custom translation.

To create a custom translation for a standard bot response

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
2. Click Manage conversation bots.
3. Click the bot you want to update, then click the Behavior tab.
4. Expand the section you want to update.
5. Under the bot message, click Manage translations.

   

6. Click the pencil icon for the language you want to customize, then enter the custom text.

   

   Repeat this step for additional languages if needed.

7. Click Done. You can test the custom bot responses at this point, or after publishing the bot.
8. Publish the bot to apply the custom translation.

Testing multilingual bots

You can test your bot to evaluate the automatic and custom translation results and understand the end-user experience.

To test bot translations

1. In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
2. Click Manage conversation bots.
3. Click the bot you want to test.
4. On the bot's edit page, click Test bot. The testing sidebar opens.
5. At the top of the sidebar, use the drop-down to select the language you want to test.

   

6. Use the sidebar to start a conversation with the bot. To reset and start a new conversation, click the Reload icon ().

   Repeat these steps for each language you want to test.