Chatbots are evolving into something that customers and businesses want, such as going local and speaking to customers in any language they want. Chatbot localization is spreading rapidly, thanks to digitalization. Communication plays an important role for every business, that’s why there is a need to have multilingual chat to cater to audience from every region.
According to a survey, 69 percent of consumers prefer chatbots for quick multilingual communication with brands. This figure should not be too concerning because people are now more than willing to incorporate a dash of AI into their daily lives. And, because chatbots fall under the self-service category, the need for them is greater than ever. But English dominating conversational chatbots might hinder the growth of businesses on a global level as only a few percentages of people in this world speak English as their first language.
Given the growing number of chatbot users and the importance of multilingual service in any business, chatbots have evolved to a point where they can understand and store data and converse in the customer's preferred language.
The need for a multilingual Chatbot
Not everyone in this world speaks English. Statistically, only 1.5 billion of the world's 7.5 billion inhabitants speak English, 20% of the total population. Furthermore, the majority of them are not native English speakers. Only 360 million of the 1.5 billion people speak English as their first language. Though the AI chatbot has seen massive growth in recent years as every business considers the customer experience the most important factor in their development, the post-pandemic world necessitates adding more changes to the business model.
Every business now needs to have an online presence, and there are over 24 million e-commerce stores worldwide. Any user can visit any website, but it's not possible to change the website's content in every possible language. Therefore, language detection comes in the role, where language is changed as per the geographical area.
So, to conclude, businesses are deploying multilingual chatbots to ease communication with customers. When creating a multilingual chatbot, it is important to consider the factors that will have an effect on the ability of the chatbot to be successful in different languages.
Easy to switch languages
One of them is easy to switch languages. You want your chatbot to be able to easily switch between languages, and you want it to be able to do so in a way that makes sense for both the user and for your business.
Introductory messages in all languages
Next is you can create introductory multilingual messages.It will always improve the user experience by making sure everything works smoothly and intuitively with the customer.
No missing values
It is important to structure the chat flow, so that you don’t miss any important value while communicating with your customers.
Avoid special characters
For a chatbot to be effective, it needs to have a clear and simple interface. The best way to achieve this is by avoiding special characters in the text that you use. Avoiding these characters will help ensure that your bot is easily readable by your users and that they can understand what you're trying to say.
Localized and personalized
When you use the chatbot, it will listen to your questions and respond directly to them. It will also learn from your past interactions and tailor its responses based on what it knows about you—so that over time, your conversations will be more flexible and tailored to your needs.
Cost & Cultural alignment
Chatbots should be culturally aligned with the company that makes them. This means making sure your chatbot is cot-effective, friendly and doesn't sound too robotic or fake. It also means making sure your chatbot can handle different languages and accents, so that people in different cultures can use them without feeling like they're speaking another language.
Benefits of a multilingual Chatbot
The significant advantage of a multilingual chatbot is that customers can converse in their native language. This, in turn, would improve any business's customer experience, raise their CSAT score, and lower their churn rate.
1. Reach Global Audience
2. Effective Customer Engagement
3. Enter In Competition
4. Time Saving
5. Reduce Employee Training Cost
6. To provide consistent messaging
7. To increase sales
Implementing a multilingual bot would not only help with the multilingual chat aspect, but it would also help businesses avoid the increased workforce, time, and cost associated with training employees to speak in multiple languages.
Enter Hinglish
The digital revolution in India has exponentially expanded the country's Internet user base to include a large number of non-English speakers who outnumber English speakers. While Hindi and English are more widely spoken than all other vernacular languages, they have given rise to a new language: Hinglish, which has more than 350 million speakers compared to only around 125 million English speakers.
So, Hinglish is a combination of Hindi and English; the customer can ask questions to the chatbot in any of the below combinations:
· Language Hindi with Latin script
· Language Hindi with Devanagari Script
But the younger generation of semi-urban and rural areas are more comfortable in the first one.
A study back in 2018 examined 1.5 million Hinglish (English-Hindi sentences) tweets from a 1.9 million sample, accounting for 1% of all tweets. While Twitter is an English-dominant medium with a percentage of Hinglish usage ranging from 1% to 5%, mediums such as WhatsApp have a much higher communication rate in this language.
So now, sales, marketing, and communication teams believe that chatbots should process 'code-mixed' languages across industries in India. These languages usually include an English line with a couple of Hindi words and vice versa and enter Hinglish.
How does it Work
To understand the technology behind Hinglish chatbots, we can take the example of the Haptik Multilingual Chatbot powered by Linguist Pro. It can be divided into three main steps.
Language auto-detection
When a user initiates a conversation in Hinglish, a brand multilingual chatbot automatically detects the language in the first three messages and understands that the user prefers to read Hindi rather than English for the remainder of the conversation. Same way if user is communicating in other language for eg, Hindi, then multilingual bot translate detect language to Hindi & converse in preferred language.
Natural Language Understanding with Transliteration
Brands proprietary NLU engine transliterates the Hindi text in Latin script to Devanagari script to better understand what the user wants to say in the query. Once the translation is complete, the NLU engine employs deep machine learning algorithms to comprehend the question in Hindi and provide an accurate response.
Respond in preferred language
Brands can select Hindi or Hinglish as their bot language to resolve and respond to user queries without the need for a human agent.
Conclusion
Personalization is essential when communicating with customers. According to a survey, 80 percent of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that provides personalized experiences. Speaking in their preferred language leaves the customer content and deeply satisfied. Thus, going online or expanding globally necessitates a company's ability to connect with customers regionally, and multilingual chatbots will a ssist with this and help to drive a smooth transition. In India, Hinglish adds a sense of pride by implying that the individual is locally grounded because they can converse in Hindi and modern because they can speak in English.
In the end, we can conclude that multilingual chatbots are the need of the hour because they provide a personalized experience to the customer.
FAQs
Which language is best for making chatbot?
The language is determined by the requirements and needs of the business. Chatbots have transformed the way businesses and brands connect with their customers. The ideal technology for making chatbots more personalized and accessible is to use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence.
Will Chatbots replace mobile apps in the future?
Chatbots can take the role of humans. Mobile apps are not a new phenomenon. The technology industry has always gone through major revolutions, and this is one of them. When browsers supplanted desktop operating systems as the new platform, trends began. Message bots will replace mobile apps in the same way that websites supplanted client-server programme in the past.
Customers are now seeing the advent of numerous mobile programme such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger. Customers and organizations can use chatbots to connect with third-party services from within the messaging application UI.
How do you make a chatbot multilingual?
Building a multilingual bot is a wise decision for any company that wants to reach customers outside of English-speaking countries. We build Chatbots that can communicate in different languages. Building a distinct bot for each language may appear to be the best answer at first. However, having many bots in your page's inbox would simply confuse you and your users. Instead, the ideal way is to create different flows (one for each language) within the same Messenger bot. To know more about our chatbot development services.
How many languages are supported by chatbots?
Chatbots can provide multilingual support at the same time. Languages are full of nuance and are heavily influenced by cultural background. AI will also assist a bot in determining what to do if a user answers in another language with slang, idioms, misspellings, or 'internet talk.' Your bot will be able to better grasp the user's message's intent, allowing it to deliver more accurate and helpful advice.