# Language

> One setting decides what the agent writes in and what the widget's own buttons say.

Source: https://www.hey.support/docs/agent-settings/language

---

Open the agent's **Settings**, then the Language card.

## Assistant language

Pick one language from the list. It does two things:

1. **The agent answers in it** by default.
2. **The widget's own chrome is translated into it** — buttons, labels, placeholders, the AI disclosure. Twenty-eight languages are supported.

## Follow the visitor

A checkbox under the picker. On by default.

* **On** — the agent answers in your language by default, and switches when a visitor clearly writes in another one. The widget's buttons and labels stay in your language either way.
* **Off** — the agent answers in your language throughout, even when a visitor writes in something else.

<Callout>
  The chrome deliberately never follows the visitor. It has to paint before anyone has typed, so there is nothing to detect yet, and re-labelling buttons mid-conversation under someone's cursor is worse than one consistent language.
</Callout>

## How switching actually works

There is no language detector. The **model** decides, reading the whole conversation rather than one message in isolation — which makes it far better at this than a statistical guess on a short string.

It is told to ignore the things that used to cause false switches: a name, a place, a currency symbol, a single foreign word quoted inside an otherwise English sentence. When in doubt it stays in your language.

The visitor's browser language is used as a hint to disambiguate very short messages, never as a trigger on its own. Their country is deliberately not used at all — where someone is says very little about what they want to read.

<Callout type="warn">
  If you previously set a "forced language", it was carried over as your language with **Follow the visitor switched off** — the same behaviour you had. Nothing to redo.
</Callout>