Language translation
Detect the visitor's language; translate a suggested reply into it before sending.
A visitor writing in Romanian doesn't want to read an English reply, even if your KB only has English content. This feature bridges the gap.
How it works
It piggy-backs on the Chat reply suggestions flow:
- Agent clicks ✨ AI suggest reply.
- The reply suggester generates an English draft (drawing from your English KB).
- The translator examines the visitor's last message, detects its language, and if it's not English, generates a translation of the suggested reply into that language.
- Both versions appear in the violet panel — agent picks Use for the original or Use translated version for the translated one.
The detected language label appears too — "Visitor language: Romanian" — so the agent knows what they're getting.
Languages supported
Anything Haiku can handle, which is most major world languages. We don't constrain the prompt to a specific set.
The detection is heuristic; a one-word visitor message might be miscategorized. The translation is decent for full sentences and brittle for terse / slang messages.
What translation IS
A best-effort rephrase of your KB-grounded English reply into the visitor's language. The factual content is the same; the prose is in the target language.
What translation is NOT
- A live human translation service. It's a model, it's wrong sometimes.
- A multilingual KB substitute. Translating one reply doesn't fix the underlying problem that your KB is English-only. If you have non-English customers, see Translations.
- Pre-translated canned replies. Each translation is generated fresh per click; no caching.
Cost
Adds maybe 1000 input + 200 output tokens to a normal chat-reply-suggest call — roughly $0.003 extra. Total per click stays under $0.01.
Off-switch
Two places to control it, with different scope:
- Chat → Settings → Appearance → AI translation. Per-widget toggle (Pro). When off, the translator returns null; only the original English suggestion shows up in the reply panel. You can also pick the target locale the agent reads visitor messages in — useful if your team itself isn't English-first.
- Settings → AI (workspace-wide). Master switch that disables every translation call across the workspace regardless of per-widget config.
Two modes
The same feature plays two roles depending on which toggles are on:
- Reply assist (default). Agent-driven, per-click. Used when the agent presses ✨ AI suggest reply. Adds one detection + one translation call per click.
- Continuous translate (Pro, per widget). The widget auto-translates both directions — visitor messages get translated into the agent's reading locale on the way in, agent replies get translated into the visitor's detected language on the way out. Conversation feels bilingual to both sides.
Continuous mode obviously costs more (every message, not just reply-suggest clicks). The numbers are still small — ~$0.001 per direction per message.
When the visitor IS writing English
The translator is bypassed entirely — no detection call, no translation call, no cost. The reply panel just shows the original draft. If you're never going to have non-English customers, leaving this feature on costs nothing in practice.