How to Build a Multilingual Chatbot

Language is an important aspect of everyone’s life. People can relate more to the conversation in a language they understand. And therefore language plays a prominent role in the success of a business.

Since now we have access to smart translators on our tips, it has become very easy to communicate in multiple languages.

Businesses tend to have a website in multiple languages so that their targeted audience can easily understand their products/services. This not only makes them understandable but also increases the trust of their customers.

But just multilingual website is not enough to serve the purpose, to deliver best customer support, it is inevitable to address customer queries in their preferred language. It feels relatable when a business speaks the customer’s language and thus gets more acknowledgment by customers.

For multilingual live chat, businesses usually hire support agents for different languages depending upon the requirements, but we all know human agent based support has time limitations and cannot be scaled easily.

And businesses nowadays are smart enough to automate their customer support. It is easy to build and implement AI Agents whether chat, voice or AI agents on any communication channel.

Chatbot or chat AI agent can handle multiple queries at a time and is active all the time. A omnichannel chatbot can be trained in multiple ways to give adequate support on behalf of a business.

Chatbots are also capable of understanding and processing multiple languages. The language barrier a business might face in customer communications is cut down with the help of a multilingual chatbot.

Why Businesses need Multilingual Chatbots?

In today’s day and age customers expect to interact with businesses in their preferred language, across channels, and without delays. Multilingual chatbots help businesses meet their requirements.

Now we no more address them as “Bots” but we often call them AI Agents, agents that can think, reason and assist for all our tasks.

Chat AI Agent being one of the common conversational AI tool adapted by organizations, it is widely used and preferred by customers. We have moved a step further to just limiting to conversational AI and moving towards Generative AI, AI capable to generating answers instantly within few seconds and providing most accurate answers to customer queries.

Chat AI Agents are not just good for improving customer experience but also helps business with improved ROIs.

“Businesses using chatbots have reported an average sales increase of 67%”

Global Customer Reach

Having multilingual capabilities helps you reach easily to global customers which indirect helps with more sales and improved support. When businesses try to expand across regions, often language barriers become bottleneck for them. Multilingual chatbots help them easily communicate in different languages ensuring accessibility and inclusivity without the need for region-specific support teams.

Improved Customer experience

No doubt when you offer customer service in customers preferred language, they will be loyal to your brand over any other. You are not just offering them support but it becomes truly about the experience you are giving to your customers when they want to communicate with your business.

82% of consumers prefer chatbots over waiting for human support

Multilingual chatbots provide:

• Faster resolutions

• Clearer communication

• Reduced misunderstandings

Reduce Operational Costs at Scale

Hiring and maintaining multilingual support teams is expensive and very difficult to scale when business needs rises. Multilingual chatbots can handle high-volume repetitive queries across all the supported languages, reducing the need for dedicated support teams, human agents can focus on other high value tasks and business can run smoothly with limited staff.

Enable 24/7 Support Across Regions

Often time zones and regional availability becomes bottleneck while scaling a business, but deploying a chatbot makes it easy to address customer queries regardless of location or time. With the help of multilingual chatbots orgs can offer round the clock support for all the regions.

Competitive advantage in international markets

With a multilingual chatbot your business can get a strong competitive edge in international market, customers are likely to interact with your business when they can communicate in their preferred language, and most likely they will stay loyal overtime.

By removing language barriers, you can make your business global entering new geographies faster, scale customer support without adding regional teams, and maintain consistent customer service worldwide. Multilingual chatbots are not just for accessibility but makes a brand trustworthy.

In a global economy, the ability to engage customers in multiple languages isn’t just a convenience - it’s a strategic advantage.

How Multilingual Chatbots Work?

1. Language detection

When a conversation starts user either selects communication language, or chatbot detects the language based on what user speaks, mostly AI agents use automatic language identification for smooth conversations, user need not to select any language.

In some cases, chatbots also detect language based on the geolocation or browser’s language settings.

2. Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

Once language is detected, chatbot uses NLU to interpret user query and extracts necessary information. Unlike language translations bot tries to understand semantic meaning that lets system fetch query correctly regardless of linguistic structure or phrasing.

3. User Response

Based on query bot fetches appropriate answer from knowledge-base, connects to a pre-defined workflow or perform any action. Once bot fetches correct response it dynamically translates the answer and sends it to customer.

Bots are also capable of maintaining conversation state and context and can resume from where user leaves the chat. This enables bot to maintain consistent experience across voice, chat and any other user facing channels.

How to build a multilingual chatbot?

You can easily build multilingual chatbots with a no/low code platform, now no one would really sit and code for several days when you can build intelligent bots with no-code platforms.

Floatbot.AI is one such robust conversational AI platform that lets you build multilingual chatbots without a single line of code. It supports 150+ languages to choose from and advanced features that makes your chatbot super smart and personalised.

You can choose from any platforms what lets you build bot without coding.
Here are the steps on how you can build multilingual chatbot with Floatbot.AI

Step 1:

Create a bot or AI Agent by giving name, add your use-case and description regarding your AI Agent, this is a basic step which is there in almost all the platforms.

Step 2:

Choose on how do you plan to use your AI Agent, it can be self-service chat, voice or agent assist, with Floatbot you can build self-service chat, voice, email or SMS agents, real-time agent assist or can use API for speech to text or text to speech (FloatNEO) and FloatGPT (LLM as a service) all from one single platform.

Step 3:

Now you get two options using which you can build your chatbot, either by Agentic AI i.e. LLM based workflow, wherein you just need to give a prompt regarding your requirements and LLM will build a workflow for you or either Agent M i.e. multi-agent based workflow or fixed intent based workflow where you need to manually create workflow and add intents.

Step 4:

Here we will go with fixed flow so that you have full control over your workflow and you can manage all the items by yourself.

Step 5:

Once you are done with your workflow, you need to configure all the languages in your bot. You can select from over 150 languages by just selecting it from configure section.

Common challenges while building multilingual chatbots and how to overcome those challenges

Building a multilingual chatbot comes with its own set of challenges, from language accuracy to cultural tone differences and dialects. Teams often underestimate multiple aspects of different languages and complexities associated with them. Here are some of the common challenges and how you can address them.

1. Direct Translation

When implementing languages to bot, don’t use direct translations because translations fails at capturing tone, intent of the user queries, slangs and idioms, due to which the queries can be misinterpreted resulting in incorrect responses.

Instead select a model which works on intents and are trained on language specific datasets. With all the new AI platforms and LLMs this will not be the case, you will always get intent specific responses in all the languages.

2. Dialects, Accents, and Regional Variations

Single language can have multiple regional diversity and differ from each other in almost all the regions, which might confuse bots when trained on generic datasets.

But to overcome this you should start with common languages and then customize slowly as per the regions later on. This will help you build a strong language supportive bot overtime.

3. Language detection and switching

Users may change languages mid-conversation or might mix two languages in one message. This might cause broken workflows and incorrect responses.

To overcome this scenario, automatic language detection becomes mandatory. You should implement automatic language detection and the ability to switch languages during the workflow, allowing users to change languages within flows without restarting the conversation.

4. Testing and Quality Assurance Across Languages

Testing bots in all the supported languages can be tedious and time-consuming, but it is also necessary to maintain a consistent user experience across all supported languages.

Therefore, opt for platforms that allow you to automate testing, like what you get in Floatbot.AI. You get a test lab where all the test cases are automatically tested, and you receive results on bot performance. Also, make sure to analyze bot performance and bot responses for all the languages.

Wrap-Up

Multilingual chatbots are no longer a nice-to-have—they are essential for businesses to serve global audience. When built right, bots can deliver best CX in the most meaningful, context-aware relevant conversations. With a right platform and robust AI, bots can connect, engage and scale easily. Build multilingual chatbot with Floatbot.AI