Languages

Geeky Bot understands shopper questions in twelve languages and works with WPML and Polylang. Its own screens and built-in replies are translated into 19 languages, which it downloads from geekybot.com for your site’s language.

Shopper languages

Shopper questions are understood in these twelve languages:

Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

In each of them, Geeky Bot understands:

Colour, size, price, stock and “not this” filters, such as “shoe not black”.
Requests for sale, newest, popular and top-rated products.
Around 2,000 built-in product-word translations, so search works across languages. An English shopper finds Arabic products, and a Spanish shopper finds English ones.

Questions in other languages still search by the words typed, and fall back to English for understanding what the shopper wants. Words specific to your catalog can be added as custom synonyms. See Catalog quality and synonyms.

Geeky Bot reads the shopper’s language from the question: from its script (Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and from common words in Latin-script languages. When that doesn’t settle it, it uses the language from WPML or Polylang, then your site’s language.

WPML and Polylang

Geeky Bot works with WPML and Polylang without extra settings. When the question alone doesn’t show its language, Geeky Bot uses the language WPML or Polylang reports for the page. Each translation of a product is its own post in both plugins, so translations are indexed and searched separately with no extra setup: a Spanish product is found by a Spanish query.

Right-to-left languages

Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left messages read right to left in the chat, both the shopper’s messages and the replies. Nothing needs to be set.

Reply language

Local grounded mode: built-in replies use Geeky Bot’s translation for your site’s language.
Zywrap or OpenAI: the AI is told to reply in the shopper’s language, and to leave product names, brands, SKUs, coupon codes and page titles exactly as they are.
Commerce Pro: the Multilingual replies setting controls the reply language in AI modes. See Sales rules and guardrails.

The default widget texts, such as the welcome message and starter prompts, show in your site’s language as long as you haven’t edited them. Text you write yourself is shown as you wrote it. See Storefront Widget.

What stays in English

Cart and checkout commands, with Commerce Pro, are English-only in this release.
Store-policy questions are recognised from English wording. See Store Knowledge.

Plugin translations

Geeky Bot doesn’t ship its translations inside the plugin. On a site that isn’t in English, or whose users have chosen another language, it downloads the translation for each of those languages from geekybot.com. This happens when Geeky Bot is installed or updated, when the site language changes, and once a day to pick up improved wording. The files go into wp-content/languages/plugins/, where plugin updates can’t delete them. Commerce Pro uses the same translation.

Translations exist for 19 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. A regional variant gets the nearest translation, so Swiss German gets German.

The Languages screen

Open Geeky Bot → Languages to see and manage translations.

This site’s languages lists each language your site uses, its status (for example Installed, Update available or Not installed yet) and how much of it is translated.
Install now or Update now installs a language straight away. Check for updates checks all of them.
Use it for me switches your own admin language. The rest of the site keeps its language. Use English for me switches you back.
All translations lists every language with its .po, .mo and .zip files to download, and Install to add a language to the site.

The .po file is the one you edit, with Poedit or Loco Translate. The .mo file is what WordPress reads. Both go in wp-content/languages/plugins/.

Turn automatic downloads off

Add this line to wp-config.php:

define('GEEKYBOT_TRANSLATIONS_AUTO', false);

Geeky Bot then downloads nothing by itself. You can still install a language with Install now or Update now, or download the files and upload them yourself. On sites that don’t allow plugins to install files (DISALLOW_FILE_MODS), download the files from Languages and upload them to wp-content/languages/plugins/. See Constants.

What the download sends

Geeky Bot reads a public list at https://geekybot.com/translations/v2/index.json and downloads a .zip holding a .po and a .mo file, checked against the SHA-256 the list gives. A file that doesn’t match is refused. Nothing about your site is sent: no address, no key and no content. The request names only Geeky Bot and its version.