What is a multilingual chatbot?

In a globalized digital landscape, multilingual chatbots emerge as essential assets for businesses aiming to provide seamless customer service across diverse linguistic territories. These AI-driven virtual assistants proficiently interact in multiple languages, responding to inquiries and executing simple tasks. This linguistic prowess, rooted in advanced natural language processing engines and large-scale multi-language models like BERT, empowers businesses to engage with a global audience effortlessly. With types ranging from rule-based to Neural Machine Translation (NMT)-based, multilingual chatbots are paving the way for enhanced customer experience, demonstrating a significant leap towards erasing language barriers in digital communication

What is multilingual chatbot?

A multilingual chatbot is a virtual assistant that can converse with customers in multiple languages. It responds to inquiries and completes easy tasks in the language that the consumer prefers using artificial intelligence. Multilingual chatbots can be found on websites and messaging programs like Facebook Messenger, offering live chat and automated service in several languages.  These are essential for companies that conduct business globally. They enable companies to communicate with a worldwide audience.

Types of multilingual chatbots

Multilingual chatbots can be classified into the following types:

Rule-based chatbots

The first type of chatbots that were created using pre-established rules or scripts are called rule-based chatbots, sometimes known as scripted chatbots. When producing responses to user inputs, these chatbots adhere to a predetermined set of rules. When answering typical questions or responding to commands from a computer system, such as making a restaurant reservation, giving a customer the tracking number and delivery window for an order they have purchased, or handling other simple requests, a rule-based bot is ideal.

Statistical machine translation (SMT)-based chatbots

Statistical machine translation is a kind of machine translation that automatically translates text or speech between languages by using statistical models. Its premise is that, given the statistical patterns of the languages involved, the best way to translate a text is to identify the translation that, in the majority of cases, created the original content. Chatbots and statistical machine translation are related because chatbots may converse with users in multiple languages thanks to statistical machine translation. To connect with a larger audience, a chatbot that use statistical machine translation, for instance, may be designed to comprehend and react to user input in a variety of languages. Statistical machine translation-based chatbots are especially helpful in customer service situations where they may help multilingual users or provide real-time language translation.

Neural machine translation (NMT)-based chatbots

Artificial neural networks are used in neural machine translation (NMT), a sort of machine translation that converts speech or text between languages. Large-scale human-translated text datasets are used to train neural machine translation (NMT) systems, enabling them to learn statistical patterns and correlations between source and target languages.

An NMT system converts the source text into a numerical representation before processing it through a neural network to translate a text. The incoming data is analysed and interpreted by the neural network, which is made up of several layers of interconnected “neurons.” A translation of the original text is then produced by decoding the neural network’s output back into the target language.

Benefits of using a multilingual chatbot

• Customers can transact with them in the language of their choice. When customers are able to purchase goods, get information, and get service in their own language, their conversion rate rises dramatically. Businesses run the risk of losing clients if they don’t provide multilingual help.
• With self-service alternatives, multilingual chatbots enhance the client experience. Consumers don’t have to wait for a response to discover simple answers to frequently asked questions. Since chatbots respond to questions quickly, 68%[1] of users prefer them.
• Bots can answer a lot of simple, repeated questions. This improves morale and lightens the workload for your customer service staff.
• Multilingual chatbots minimise the amount of work that users must do to finish an interaction. When a bot speaks your native speech, conversing with it is simple. Customers are more likely to move forward with a purchase when interactions are simple.
• For a prompt resolution, your customers prefer to communicate with you using chatbots. Before customer service representatives can answer their questions, 52%[2] of consumers hang up. It’s a horrible idea to keep consumers waiting, and it will probably cost you sales. Also, studies show that chatbots can answer 80%[2] of consumer questions.
• You may beat out your rivals by providing multilingual service. You’re more likely to win over a customer who has to choose between you and a competing brand if you speak their language. Multilingual chatbots give your business an edge and make it more appealing to potential customers.

How do multilingual chatbots work?

The majority of multilingual chatbots are designed to interact in a particular language by a bot designer, or they are developed with an advanced natural language processing engine that assists them in identifying language. Depending on how it is written, it can automatically identify language using either its built-in engine or by examining the end user’s browser choices. Some chatbots use methods from large-scale multi-language models, such as BERT, mBERT, LASER, and so on. In order to provide better service, multilingual chatbots can identify the language a consumer is speaking. For example, the chatbot will assist a customer speaking French if they communicate with it in that language. However, the chatbot will respond in English if the subsequent user asks a question in English.

Examples of multilingual chatbots

• Google Assistant supports over 100 languages.
• Apple Siri supports over 20 languages.
• Amazon Alexa supports over 20 languages.
• Microsoft Cortana supports over 15 languages.
• Facebook Messenger chatbots can be created in over 100 languages.
• WhatsApp chatbots can be created in over 25 languages.
• Telegram chatbots can be created in over 10 languages.
• Heyday is a multilingual chatbot platform that supports over 50 languages.
• Interakt is a multilingual chatbot platform that supports over 20 languages.
• Haptik is a multilingual chatbot platform that supports over 25 languages.
• Contakt is a multilingual chatbot platform that supports over 15 languages.
• Gen AI-Powered Customer Support is a multilingual chatbot platform that supports over 10 languages.

How to make a multilingual chatbot for your needs?

Here are the steps on how to make a multilingual chatbot for your needs:

Choose your target audience

To create a successful multi-lingual chatbot, you need to have a well-structured plan. Identify who your audience is, how they interact with your business brand and how you are going to measure success. All these will decide your chatbot user experience and conversational workflows. You must make sure you properly analyze the customer journey and trends to identify their pain points. This will help you get a headstart by establishing a few key use cases for your chatbot.

Define your marketing goals

We need to make a clear list of the goals we want to achieve from our chatbot. We will need to ascertain the chatbot’s entire set of objectives. It may involve understanding and responding in multiple languages, lowering the cost of marketing, shortening the wait time of customers, or even focusing on a more focused objective like better communication. We may develop a targeted approach to make sure our chatbot first accomplishes that objective. IT engineers will use the specific requirements and the order of importance for each goal as a tactical guide to create a healthcare chatbot that meets our expectations. Numerous chatbot systems are available, each with unique features and advantages. We need to select a platform based on our needs and financial constraints.

Choose a chatbot platform that meets your needs

Once we’ve decided what we want our chatbot to accomplish, we can design a targeted approach to make sure it gets there. Since it frees up about 80% of agents’ time to deal with more difficult customers’ concerns, our chatbot should initially respond to language-oriented questions. Once our chatbot’s goals have been established, we need to decide which platform will work best for it. The platform needs to be easy for our customers to use, affordable, and meet all the functional requirements for our chatbot.

Design Conversation Flow

The natural progression of questions and answers in a discussion is known as conversation flow. When developing the conversational flow of your chatbot, keep in mind that customers using different languages like to interact with chatbots that possess genuine conversational skills. You should also consider the customer journey and the kind of experiences you wish to provide.

Customize Chatbot Appearance

Adding a personality to your chatbot makes it more relatable to users and helps it complement your brand. Many firms additionally decide to give their bot a name so that customers are aware that they are speaking with a bot. This allows them to maintain a nice atmosphere while allowing them to be open and honest with customers. For your chatbot to have a consistent voice and clear standards, make sure copywriting teams are included in the process.

Integrate with Communication Channels

The third stage is to decide the channels your bot will utilise to communicate with customers after you have established the look of your bot and the use cases. The bot can be used through a variety of channels, such as your website, app, GPT integrations, chatting app, or all of the above.  It is important to keep in mind that every channel is unique, possessing distinct technical specifications and modes of communication. You must ensure that the chatbot we develop functions properly on the channel or channels you are choosing and supports each language that we might intend to use.

Test and launch your Chatbot

Thorough testing is crucial once your chatbot is built before it is put into use. You can locate and address any issues with this assistance. Your chatbot can be added to other systems or your website once you are happy with it. Its comprehension and response to user inquiries are verified by testing. Particularly for AI chatbots, a variety of user intent expressions and variations (words, phrases, grammar, spelling) must be used for training and testing. It will be necessary to update rule-based chatbots’ intent classification manually. More manifestations of intent are possible with AI chatbots. Additional aspects that need to be tested include navigation, usability, fallback (which evaluates the bot’s reaction to irrelevant inputs), user tone identification, and small conversation.

Best practices for building Multilingual chatbots

Here are some best practices for building multilingual chatbots:

1. We must choose the right chatbot platform. There are a number of different multilingual chatbot platforms available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
2. We must choose a high-quality translation service to translate your chatbot’s dialogue flow and training data into all of the languages you want to support.
3. We should use a machine-learning chatbot platform as they are easier to develop and maintain than rule-based chatbots, and they can be trained to support multiple languages.
4. We need to use a translation API to translate the chatbot’s responses into the user’s language. This is especially important for chatbots that are used in real time, such as customer support chatbots.
5. We must test our chatbot with users who speak different languages. This will help us to identify any areas where the chatbot needs improvement.
6. After deploying the chatbot, it is important to monitor its performance to identify any areas where it can be improved. This includes tracking metrics such as user satisfaction, conversation length, and error rate.
7. It is important to update your chatbot’s dialogue flow and training data to reflect these changes. You should also add new features and improve the chatbot’s performance over time.
8. We must use a consistent tone and style across languages. This will help to create a unified experience for users.
9. We must avoid using language or imagery that could be offensive or confusing to users in other cultures.
10. The chatbot should be able to understand the context of the user’s query and provide a relevant response.
11. The chatbot should have a fallback mechanism in place to handle queries that it cannot understand. This could involve transferring the user to a human agent or providing a list of frequently asked questions.

Future of multilingual chatbots

• The global conversational AI market is growing quickly, according to Deloitte’s signals and strategies field research into the topic. AI-powered chatbots and smart virtual assistants are predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% between 2020 and 2025, reaching approximately US$14 billion. This merely summarises how multilingual chatbots are a great extra feature that deserves due recognition and how Advanced Conversational AI is assisting organisations in growing. Companies have the chance to expand internationally given the quick change in market paradigms. The largest communication obstacle that small and medium-sized businesses must overcome is language, which restricts them to a specific set of individuals with a particular dialect.
• Multilingual Chatbots are a feasible solution designed to allow companies to overcome geographical barriers and allow them to interact with a variety of communities and people. With the help of multilingual chatbots, businesses may close the gap and enter the market independently.
• In the context of hyper-personalization, language is essential for enhancing the client experience. Not only are you as a business listening to what your customers want, but you’re also letting them speak to you in their language of choice. Customers are empowered by this since they can choose their preferred mode of contact. It will raise the possibility that a business will get a loyal client. The best method to raise customer happiness is to deploy the most sophisticated multilingual Conversational AI chatbots.
• Managing a high volume of client requests can be difficult, particularly if your business caters to a global clientele. Although multilingual chatbots are inexpensive, they may result in a queue for one-on-one conversations with agents. Chatbots that speak multiple languages have the ability to analyse client expectations. By concentrating on the demands of the consumer, the data is examined and stored to improve the quality of goods and services. Conversational AI facilitates intelligent communication between businesses and their clientele. The extensive knowledge base that chatbots are fed determines their ability to speak in any language, and to do so in a natural and fluent way.
• Undoubtedly, conversational AI is gaining ground on multilingual chatbots as a comprehensive customer support and engagement tool for businesses, associations, and even multinational corporations.

Conclusion

We can see from this article that multilingual chatbots are quite helpful. They speak hundreds of languages and are capable of performing the tasks of hundreds of people. They can also save you money and the trouble of having to hire multilingual employees.

The nice part is that setting up a multilingual chatbot is not too difficult. We have two options: we can create it ourselves or employ a chatbot-specialized company to implement it for us. All things considered, having a multilingual chatbot will benefit both you and your clients. That’s why the majority of global companies employ them.

Multilingual chatbot development is essential to expanding the programme’s reach internationally. A smooth and consistent experience can be achieved by specifying target languages, using language-friendly platforms, and creating a flexible dialogue structure that can be delivered across various languages. Additionally, acknowledging localization, conducting rigorous testing, gathering user feedback, integrating language choices, and adequately training the chatbot in each distinct language are pivotal practices for the creation of effective multilingual chatbots. Capitalizing on it’s potential and its multilingual communication capabilities will contribute to elevating the quality of global services and connecting with diverse communities across the globe.