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Part 5 · Beyond the web page

AI features

Chapter 21 15 min read 12 sections

Imagine a support assistant built into a product that's been carefully localised. A customer in São Paulo opens it from a screen that's entirely in Brazilian Portuguese and asks where her order is. The assistant looks the order up with a tool call, reads back a block of English JSON, and replies: "Your order shipped on 11/04/2026 and should arrive by Thursday."

Every button around that reply is translated. The reply itself is in English, and the date in it reads as 11 April to anyone in Brazil, when the model meant 4 November.

Nobody wrote that sentence, so no translator ever saw it. A translation file can't hold text that doesn't exist until the model writes it. Chapters 8 and 9 covered using AI to translate your strings and your users' content. This chapter is about the AI features themselves: assistants, summaries, search and anything else in your product where a model writes text the user reads.

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The rest of this chapter is for readers of the book

Get the book to read the rest of this chapter and every other one, the field guide and the glossary, and to download the whole book as a PDF.

Still to come in this chapter

  • Which language should it answer in?
  • One prompt, many locales
  • Let the model write words, not formats
  • Quality isn't the same in every language
  • Some languages cost more
  • Safety filters speak English best
  • Search and retrieval across languages
  • Speech in and out
  • The interface around the model
  • Testing it in every language
  • Checklist
  • Further reading