This article includes the following topics:
Supporting single-language AI agents
By default, your AI agent language is set to your account's default language.
To specify a default language for an AI agent
-
In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
- Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
- Click the AI agent you want to update.
- Click the Settings tab.
- 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 AI agents
If your customer base uses multiple languages for communication, there are several settings throughout Suite you can configure, including:
Activating automatic translation for an AI agent
In your AI agent settings, you can activate a feature that automatically translates the text elements in an AI agent’s standard responses configured in the Behavior tab
If the AI agent is embedded in a help center, the AI agent text is translated into the customer's selected help center language. If the AI agent is embedded in your website, the AI agent text is translated into the customer's selected browser language.
You can override automatic translations of standard responses by creating custom message translations.To activate automatic translation
-
In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
- Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
- Click the AI agent you want to update, then click the Settings tab.
- Expand the Language section and use the drop-down menu to select your default language.
- Select Translate AI agent messages to activate automatic translation.
- 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 AI agent responses at this point, or after publishing the AI agent.
- Publish the AI agent after changing the language.
Customizing automatic message translations for standard responses
Custom message translations are manually written versions of the text in the message fields of a AI agent’s standard response. 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 AI agent 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.
To create a custom translation for a standard AI agent response
- In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
- Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
- Click the AI agent you want to update, then click the Behavior tab.
- Expand the section you want to update.
- Under the AI agent message, click Manage
translations.
- Click the pencil icon for the language you want to
customize, then enter the custom text.
Repeat this step for additional languages if needed.
- Click Done.
You can test the custom AI agent responses at this point, or after publishing the AI agent.
- Publish the AI agent to apply the custom translation.
Translating help center articles
AI-generated replies sent by the AI agent might 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 AI agent, human 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.
Testing multilingual AI agents
You can test your AI agent to evaluate the automatic and custom translation results and understand the end-user experience.
To test AI agent translations
- In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
- Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
- Click the AI agent you want to test.
- On the AI agent's edit page, click Test AI agent. The testing sidebar opens.
- At the top of the sidebar, use the drop-down to select the
language you want to test.
- Use the sidebar to start a conversation with the AI agent.
To reset and start a new conversation, click the
Reload icon (
).
Repeat these steps for each language you want to test.
Customizing automatic message translations (Legacy)
To create a custom translation for an answer in bot builder
- In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select AI agents and automation > AI agents.
- Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
- Click the AI agent you want to update, then click the Answers tab.
- Select the answer you're creating a custom translation for, then click the step you want to update.
- Under the AI agent message, click Manage
translations.
- Click the pencil icon for the language you want to customize, then
enter the custom text.
Repeat this step for additional languages if needed.
- Click Done. You can test the custom AI agent responses at this point, or after publishing the AI agent.
- Publish the AI agent to apply the custom translation.
45 comments
Daniel Aron
Hey folks, I'm happy to share the release of custom translations for Zendesk AI agents (conversation bots) on messaging. Here's the announcement. This feature is designed to solve some of the problems mentioned in this comment thread relating to offering multilingual bots and managing automatic translations. Please try it out and provide feedback on how it's working for you and your business.
1
Viachaslau
Great news Daniel Aron 🙌. We look forward to adding more languages (Ukrainian, Catalan, Hebrew, Latvian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Portuguese, Slovenian, Danish, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Thai (Siamese) and Cantonese).
Is it correct, that “this is a translation from the default language” was finally removed for non-default languages?
0
Viachaslau
이지훈(maclaude) I also like that they removed this message. It looked unprofessional.
0
Daniel Aron
Hi Viachaslau
Yes, confirming that was removed as part of this release.
1
Sarah dw
Hi, is this customization of translation available for “options” in the flow builder ?
2
이지훈(maclaude)
Hi. Sarah dw
No. You can use your own translation for the bot's messages in the options, but the button is not available yet.
0
Daniel Aron
Hi Viachaslau I'm happy to share that Zendesk bots now support more languages, including some of your examples. Here's the announcement for more details.
1
Viachaslau
Daniel Aron Thanks, we added them to our bot since the launch day :). No more odd behavior (happened occasionally) when customers spoke Ukrainian or Bulgarian 😆:
0
Marius Wilhelmi
Another strong vote to make the custom translation available for the options buttons. Since this is currently not possible, we completely need to switch off the multi-lingual support for the AI agent. There would be several ways to solve the problem:
I would prefer 2. or 3., while 3 could be helpful for the whole AI agent conversation in general.
There is a screenshot attached where you see that one of our product name “Kontakt” is automatically translated. In another case it translates a tool of us called “Native Access” that we do not want to have translated
2
Marius Wilhelmi
As follow up to my previous post above: we are looking into a workaround by using “Dynamic options”. It looks like these are not translated. It is imo unnecessary complicated to be forced to load button labels from a server, but in our first test it seems to work. However, the next problem is that we would only like certain terms not to be translated on button labels (in the example below only “Native Access”), so I am not yet sure if we should solve this problem with “Dynamic options”.
There is a nice tutorial about implementing dynamic options.
0
Arno (EMEA Partner)
I would also like to see that Option titles and Button titles would support own translatations. The shorter the text is, it is more likely that translations loose context, leading to odd translations, and poor user experience.
1
Arno (EMEA Partner)
Noting that even with longer texts terminology used in translations change to different context, like the Bot flow would not not be translated as whole having specific context, but each text translated single separate string. It would be great, if you could somehow define the context for the translations, like “apartment rental” or “car dealership”, and translations would use terminology in translations accordingly. Maybe not the best example, as these might not have overlapping terminology, but hopefully the idea is clear.
0
Anne-Flore Caire
The new features for managing custom translations are really good! One thing that still needs to be done is to be able to set different links for different languages (which cannot be managed by automatic translation). Is this a development we can look forward to?
0
Tariq
Hi team ,
We have set the styling of our messenger widget, which is presented perfectly on our site. However, when we allow for translations based on the end user's browser settings then our widget appears buggy when it is translated.
Based on the article “If the conversation bot is embedded in your website, the bot text is translated into the customer's selected browser language." This is true, but then our styling completely disappears.
How can we use translations but maintain the styling?
See below image of our styling, then the appearance on the front-end when it is a language different to our default.
0
Training Support Agent
I can only see English as an option to set language for the AI agent/ AI agents for messaging/ my chat bot / settings
That is American English. There is no settings for UK English, just ‘English’ (American).
Does anyone in support know of a way to set the bot to use British English?
0