Language Support

AI opens up a world of possibilities when it comes to communication, notably across languages. Rather than needing to find an individual who can read, write, and speak the target language, you can now use AI to bridge that gap.

This topic discusses what to expect when using AI with multiple languages, and how to get the most predictable results using Appian's AI features across languages.

Using AI to work with non-English languages

If your business operates in multiple locations or markets, you're likely familiar with both the opportunities and challenges that cross-language communication can present. Global business operations offer your goods or services to more markets, but you need to ensure that language barriers don't slow things down.

Appian's AI features can help efficiently process content in other languages, but it's important to remember that AI is non-deterministic, meaning that its output is never guaranteed. That's why one of our foundational AI principles is to treat AI as a copilot, and to keep a human being in the loop to verify output when it makes sense. This is true when using AI features to analyze, extract, or create content in all languages, including English.

Which languages does AI perform best with?

AI models are trained on multilingual data. However, their instruction-following and safety training is primarily written in English. As a general rule, AI provides the best results when you use languages with characters close to those in English and Latin.

As you work with your documents and other text-based content, you may observe the following languages have varying success:

Best	Good	Moderate	Challenging
English Italian Portuguese Dutch French Romanian Spanish	Czech German Hungarian Indonesian Polish Slovakian	Greek	Arabic Korean Chinese (Simplified) Japanese Hindi Bengali Swahili Yoruba

Think of language as a characteristic of your document, like handwriting or scan quality. Every characteristic influences how well AI is able to execute its task. To help you anticipate how well AI is able to process your documents, assemble a representative dataset and thoroughly test how it works with your non-English language content.

Feature-specific notes

AI Copilot

AI Copilot can interpret questions and provide answers in many languages, in addition to English. As with all AI, you may experience a range of responses depending on factors like language, phrasing, and complexity of the request.

If you ask a question that references a field value, we recommend wrapping that literal value in quotation marks so AI Copilot is able to reference it. This might mean the field value you reference doesn't always match the language of your question. For example, if your record data is in English, you would format a question in Spanish as: ¿Cuantos casos están "Open"?. If the record field value was also in Spanish, you would format this question as: ¿Cuantos casos están "Abierto"?

To ensure the results are satisfactory when using AI Copilot to interact with non-English documents, such as in the documents chatbot component and Enterprise Copilot, we recommend testing both non-English documents and questions.

Generative AI skills

Appian is able to extract or summarize data from documents in most languages when certain configurations are enabled. To extract data in languages other than English:

1. Create a generative AI skill that takes documents as inputs, including:
   • Extraction > Documents > Unstructured
   • Summarization > Document Text
   • PII Detection > Document Text
2. In the AI skill object, under Identify Document Type, select Visual elements & text.
   1. When Text only is selected, supported languages are the same as those supported by structured extraction.

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Other AI skills

Appian can classify and extract data from structured documents in the following languages:

• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Spanish

To extract data from documents in languages not listed here, use unstructured document extraction, described above.

In the Advanced IDP Tools AI skill, the Search Queries tool type is only capable of processing queries written in English.

Extracting handwriting

Only English handwriting is supported for character recognition and output. The AI model can still identify handwriting in other languages, but may output its closest English character equivalent. For example, the character è may output as e.

Implementation

See Multilingual Prompting to learn how to create reliable, high-quality, multilingual AI features by using English prompts with Appian’s generative AI capabilities.

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