A bilingual hire is a hiring decision, and for a lot of small businesses it is not a close one — you need Spanish on the phone maybe twice a week, which is nowhere near a role and is still enough to lose those callers.
An AI line changes the arithmetic because language is not a staffing question for it. Worth being precise about what that does and does not solve.
What the product actually supports
The agent speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese naturally. You configure a language hint, and it is one of exactly five values:
| Hint | |
|---|---|
en | English |
es-MX | Latin American Spanish |
es-ES | Peninsular Spanish |
pt-BR | Brazilian Portuguese |
pt-PT | European Portuguese |
Leave it blank and the agent detects the language from the caller.
Note that the list is exact: en-US is not accepted. That is the kind of detail that costs an
afternoon if you assume the field takes any BCP 47 tag, so it is worth writing down.
Note also that Spanish and Portuguese are each split by region here, while English is not. That is a deliberate asymmetry and the same one the rest of the product makes: Mexican and Peninsular Spanish differ in ways a caller notices, Brazilian and European Portuguese diverge in ordinary vocabulary, and there is one English on this line with no plan for a second.
Hint or detect
Set the hint when you know. A business in San Antonio whose Spanish-speaking callers are
overwhelmingly Mexican Spanish should say es-MX rather than making the model work it out on every
call. The first exchange is the one most likely to go wrong, and a hint removes the guess from exactly
that moment.
Leave it blank when your callers are genuinely mixed and you would rather the agent adapt than be right most of the time and jarring the rest.
The trade is small but real: detection happens from what the caller says, so the greeting — the first words, spoken before the agent thinks — is in whatever language you wrote it in regardless. Detection changes the conversation, not the opening line.
Which leads to the thing worth deciding deliberately.
The greeting problem
Your greeting is one piece of text. It is spoken before any detection happens. So you are choosing between:
- One language. Clean, and a Spanish-speaking caller hears English first.
- Both, briefly. "Thanks for calling Ramos Plumbing — gracias por llamar." Slightly clumsy, and it tells a Spanish speaker in the first two seconds that they are in the right place.
The second is usually right if Spanish callers are a real fraction of your volume, and the cost is worth naming: every second of the greeting is billed at the same 23 cents a minute as the useful part of the call, and calls bill in whole minutes with a one-minute floor. A five-second bilingual greeting costs nothing measurable. A twenty-second one on a thirty-second call is most of what you paid for.
What this does not fix
Your documents are in one language. The agent answers from what you wrote down. If your knowledge is in English, the agent will answer a Spanish caller in Spanish, working from English source material — which mostly works and occasionally produces a translated term nobody in your trade actually uses. If Spanish is a serious channel for you, write the collection in Spanish too.
The transfer destination is one number. If Spanish callers get transferred, they get transferred to whoever answers that number. The agent cannot route by language — it cannot choose a transfer destination at all, which is a security property rather than a gap. Language-based routing means two numbers and two agents.
Nothing downstream is bilingual. A caller who reaches a person, or a quote, or a follow-up email, is back in whatever languages your business actually operates in. The phone line is the first step, not the whole path.
That last one is the honest limit. Answering in Spanish and then handing over to a monolingual process is a better experience than not answering, and it is not the same as being a bilingual business.
What it costs
Nothing extra. Language is a configuration field, not a plan tier. The rate is 23 cents a minute of connected call time in any language — derived from 90,000 µUSD of cost per minute plus a 150% markup, rounded up to the cent — plus your own carrier's charges, which are billed by your carrier and not by us.
Compared against a bilingual hire, or against a per-minute interpretation service with a connection fee, that is a large difference for the "twice a week" case. Compared against nothing, it is the difference between those callers reaching you and not.
Status
Osokoro Phone is a private beta, approved by a person, one business at a time. Inbound only, five-minute default call cap, no transcripts retained, and you bring your own SIP number. Numbers are provisioned by an operator rather than self-serve, and the rate is proposed rather than a billing commitment.
If you know roughly how many Spanish-speaking callers you lose a month, that number is the whole business case, and you can get it from your call log rather than from us.