For organizations who need to support a multilingual employee base, Moveworks offers Multilingual Support to enable employees to communicate with Moveworks in their native language, such as Spanish, Chinese, or Italian. Yet, only allowing two-way multilingual conversation between employees and the Moveworks bot is not enough to self-service their own issues.

Without Moveworks, searching for multilingual content is a challenge:

• Existing performance of multilingual search in the enterprise is poor: Often, non-English speaking employees attempt to search for answers, struggle in the process, and eventually communicate with an agent to obtain help finding relevant knowledge articles.
• Knowledge bases are spread across different sources: If a non-English speaking employee needs to search for troubleshooting articles for IT or responses to questions about HR policies, they are trying to navigate through a range of knowledge bases. Usually, the employee ends up not finding what they need and reaches out directly to the Service Desk.

For these two reasons, Moveworks is offering MLS Answers to enable MLS activated employees to search for answers across the entire knowledge base across all supported domains.

Introduction to MLS Answers

Multilingual (MLS) Answers is the capability to ingest and serve snippets of non-English Knowledge, using a technique called cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR). In other words, Moveworks ingests all KBs, transforms them into a pivot language (in our case, English) to allow ranking across all available answers by relevance. This transformation process is done seamlessly without customer intervention.

We took this approach because the best answer can exist in two ways:

• Within the user’s preferred language, e.g. what they select as the preferred language within the Moveworks Bot.
  • We believe that showing the answers first in the user’s preferred language is the best end user experience.
• Within the lingua franca, English, of the organization.
  • In the experience, we prioritize showing the answers of the user’s preferred language, but can allow them to show more, which include Answers in English. This approach allows for the highest recall of information retrieved for users.

Considerations

• Multilingual Support (MLS) needs to be ready or has already been launched throughout the company.
• MLS Answers is configurable for both KBAs and Moveworks FAQs. Knowledge bases that are supported by Moveworks such as ServiceNow, Sharepoint, and Confluence, can be configured with MLS Answers.
• MLS Answers is only live when user's switch their bot preferred language to non-english. Otherwise, no multilingual answers will show for user's who set their bot preferred language to English.

User Experience

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Only live when user switches language to non-english

For this user who set their preferred language to Spanish, natively written Spanish KBAs will appear in the bot response. Note: If the user set the preferred language to a different language (Eg: German), even if the translation of the query matches the content natively written Spanish KBAs, the bot will not serve the Spanish article.

SLA Times

Moveworks builds bots in English, and based on user preference, the bot responses are machine translated to a user's preferred language.

For a multilingual bot, the configuration assumes that English is the primary language. When changes are performed to the strings impacting the English bot, then the system propagates those changes to other languages configured in the bot. The system ensure those strings changes maintain a consistent voice, tone, and company-specific terminology across all languages.

However, there is a time delay between when the change is made in english to other languages, temporarily creating a "Spanglish" experience. Often, these bot string changes are performing frequently during the implementation phase and significantly reduces once live in prod.

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Production considerations

A bot string can be updated either by the customer or by Moveworks performing a UX update to enrich an existing experience. For the latter, there may be a unexpected change in which english would appear temporarily.

Ingestion of non-english Forms is not supported.

Also see the Moveworks Ingestion Schedule.

FAQ

Q: What is the default search behavior without MLS Answers enabled?

A: The Bot will search and retrieve any English KB that may answer the question, even if the employee set the bot preferred language to non-English. If on-the-fly translation is enabled, then the English KBA (knowledge-base article) snippet will be translated to the user's preferred language in-chat.

Q: Why is it a separate process to enable MLS Answers?

A: All non-English KBs are automatically converted to the pivot language, English, upon ingestion. During the process, special changes are made to the search pipeline to accommodate search on English and user’s preferred language.

Q: If I have a KB in English that is also written in other languages, how does your system associate the two together?

A: The worst case is that upon retrieval, the search system will surface both versions of the KBA, in English and the user’s preferred language. Because we prioritize showing the KBA in the user’s native language, the non-English KB will be shown first.

We apply a language boosting to help show the KB in the user’s preferred language.

Q: Does this work with multilingual Forms as well?

A: No. That is not a supported feature.