IVR Multilingual Guide

What Is Multilingual IVR?

Multilingual IVR lets your phone bot greet and assist callers in their own language — automatically, without any caller input required. When a caller speaks Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Mandarin, or any of 29 supported languages, the bot detects the language and responds in kind. No "press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish" menus needed.

This feature requires the Multilingual IVR add-on on your subscription (Standard: 3 languages, Premium: 5 languages).

How It Works

1. A caller dials your IVR line and starts speaking.

2. Deepgram (the speech-to-text engine) transcribes their speech and identifies the language automatically.

3. The AI bot responds in that same language using ElevenLabs text-to-speech.

4. The conversation continues in the caller's language for the entire session.

5. Agents who receive a transferred call see the conversation with auto-translation in the inbox.

There is no additional voice quality penalty for using multilingual — the ElevenLabs voice model used is the same high-quality model used for English-only calls.

Supported Languages

The IVR supports 29 languages including: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin (Chinese), Korean, Vietnamese, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, Indonesian, Filipino, Romanian, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Finnish, Croatian, Slovak, and Arabic.

English is always supported and does not count against your language limit.

Setting Up Multilingual IVR (Two Steps)

Step 1 — Enable Languages in IVR Voice Configuration

Go to Channels → Voice / IVR → Edit and open the Voice Configuration modal. Under the Languages section, check the languages you want to support. English is always checked. You can select up to the number of languages included in your add-on (3 for Standard, 5 for Premium).

When multiple languages are selected, the transcription language is automatically set to "Auto Detect."

Step 2 — Set Bot Language to Auto Detect

In Bots → [your IVR bot] → Settings, set the Language field to Auto Detect. This tells the AI to respond in whatever language the caller uses, rather than defaulting to English. This setting works at the bot level so you can have some bots multilingual and others English-only.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does multilingual IVR cost more to run?

No. The ElevenLabs voice model used for multilingual calls costs the same per character as English-only calls ($0.000030/character). The add-on price on your subscription covers the platform capability — there is no per-call language surcharge.

Can I limit which languages are available to callers?

Yes. The language checkboxes in the IVR Voice Configuration panel let you choose exactly which languages are active. Only languages you have checked will be auto-detected and responded to. Callers speaking an unsupported language will be served in English.

What happens if a caller switches languages mid-call?

The bot re-detects the language on each utterance and responds accordingly. If a caller starts in English and switches to Spanish, the bot will start responding in Spanish.

Do my agents need to speak the caller's language?

No. When a multilingual call is escalated to a human agent, the conversation appears in the agent's inbox with the option to view auto-translated messages. Agents can read the conversation in English even if the caller spoke in another language.

Can I use multilingual for outbound IVR campaigns?

Currently, multilingual is supported for inbound calls. Outbound campaign language is set per-campaign in the campaign configuration.

Checking Your Language Limit

To see how many languages your subscription allows, go to Channels → Voice / IVR → Edit. The Languages section shows "X of N languages selected" where N is your limit. If you need more languages, contact your Velaro account manager to upgrade your Multilingual IVR add-on.