Can a WhatsApp chatbot reply in Arabic and Urdu?

Yes, and the hard part is not translation — it is detection. A customer in the Gulf may open in Arabic script, in English, or in Roman Urdu typed with English letters, and a bot that assumes one of those gets the other two wrong. Waphie reads the script of the first message, remembers the language against that contact, and answers from per-language translations attached to every step and reply.

Roman Urdu is the case most bots fail

"Salam, price kya hai?" is written in English letters, so any check based on script alone reads it as English and replies in English to someone who is more comfortable in Urdu.

Detection has to look at the words, not only the alphabet. Waphie checks the script first and then falls back to recognising Roman Urdu spellings, which is what keeps a large share of customers in the UAE and Pakistan from being answered in the wrong language.

Detect once, then remember

Language is stored on the contact rather than worked out fresh each time. A customer who wrote in Arabic in March is still answered in Arabic in June, including by a campaign sent months later.

Agents can change it by hand when the guess is wrong, and a menu step can simply ask — often the most reliable option for a first-time contact.

Every step carries its own translations

A translated bot is not one flow per language. In Waphie each step, button title and rule reply holds a translation per language, so one flow serves all of them and only the wording changes.

Button replies are matched against every translation, so a customer tapping the Arabic label follows the same branch as one tapping the English label.

  • Supported out of the box: English, Arabic, Urdu, Roman Urdu, Hindi and more
  • Per-contact language, editable by an agent
  • A language menu step when you would rather ask than guess
  • AI replies, including voice notes, in the customer's language

Where we sit

This is our product, so read it as informed rather than neutral. The test worth running on any vendor, including us: send "Salam, price kya hai?" to their demo number and see which language comes back.