TL;DR:

Please read the browser’s language setting and help us to provide (and present )localized title, description, and conversation starters when they open the chat.

User Story:

A French speaker accesses our website, using the French interface for the site. They find the chat button and open it. They are presented with a chipp bot’s title, description, and starter questions, all in English. The chat agent is capable of speaking with them in French, but unless they “try” asking a question in French, they may leave without getting the response.

Background:

We work across thousands of languages, but our sites and software support 10ish "gateway" languages like French, Arabic, Spanish that people usually have to learn to use their phones or computers. Modern localized websites can read the language or location of the browser to guess what language the person might want to use.

Most of our software documentation is in English. The goal for our bots is to harness those to provide "bring your own language" support for software through any the 90+ languages that the models can use. Basically, we want it to support the user in “any” language of wider communication, but we have no way to visually communicate to the user that their language is supported.

The agents can seamlessly give responses across those languages, except the user has to know to ask the first question in their language. Please give us a way to let the user know that their language is supported.

User Side

• Try to read the browser language setting of the user and present the starting interface (title, description, conversation starter questions, starter message) in that language. The content can be generated or developer-provided. For Right-to-Left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, adjust text positioning accordingly.

• Even if the site reads the browser settings, It is still helpful to give a a dropbox where the user can override with a “starting/interface” language, and provide the initial interface in that language.

Developer Side

I would love to translate (and use) 3 strings and 4 questions for each language for each agent to present something more accessible on the front page. Once the user asks the first question, the bot can take over and translate content on the fly. We don’t need to translate the bot’s sources.

Options

• Give the developer the option to define Title, Description and Conversation Starters in a selection of languages. This is the way the Google Play store works.

• For any languages where the dev hasn’t translated the text, generate localzed versions of the content.

• Allow the Dev to pass a language flag to the app based on user/browser settings. (Example: the user has selected already the French interface on our website, so we pass “fr” when loading the widget.) This could be passed as a variable when loading the iframe (either as a variable “lang=fr”, or url “https://keymansupport-10011648.chipp.ai/fr”).

Alternate Option Suggested

I only need to translate (and use) title, description and conversation starters to present something more accessible on the agent’s front page. Valentina has suggested duplicating the bots and providing separate copies for each target language. This presents 2 problems:

• Even 10 monolingual copies of our 50 bots would push us to 500 bots and become nearly impossible to manage updates to every copy.

• With a global audience, we don’t know what language the user will want, though we can pick a few obvious targets, and we don’t want to spend time or resources creating a fully separate bot for a language that may never be used.