Voice agents still fall apart in smaller languages like Danish

Normal-Working-2852 · reddit · 2026-07-28

The author says voice agents still degrade sharply outside English, Spanish, French, and German, using Danish as the main example. Problems include weak recognition of numbers, names, and domain terms; synthetic voices that sound unnatural in pacing, pronunciation, stress, and intonation; turn detection tuned to English-speaking patterns; and end-to-end latency above one second across providers.

They conclude that many smaller languages are only “technically supported” via generic multilingual defaults rather than real optimization, and ask other builders in languages such as Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Czech, Hebrew, European Portuguese, Korean, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish which setups actually reach production quality.

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