Zendesk Announces Real-Time Voice Translation for Live Contact Center Agents

Zendesk has announced real-time voice translation for live agents, available through its CCaaS solution, Zendesk Contact Center.

The Real-Time Voice Translation tool allows agents and customers to speak in different languages, with bidirectional AI dynamically translating the conversation in real time. 

As a result, customers and agents can speak naturally in their preferred languages, without interpreters or language-specific agents.

Of course, contact center voice translation is not new. 

However, these systems have traditionally chained together speech-to-text, translation engines, and text-to-speech, creating a noticeable lag between what a customer says and how quickly an agent can respond. 

Critically, that delay can stilt the natural flow of a conversation and damage rapport.

Voice AI specialists such as Krisp and Sanas have been among the few to overcome that challenge at scale.

Zendesk now believes it has cracked the code, while integrating real-time translation directly into the contact center workflow.

As such, Zendesk can identify a customer’s preferred language in the call queue and notify the agent, who may then activate translation from their desktop as the conversation begins, enabling a smoother, two-way experience.

“When an issue is complex, sensitive, or urgent, people want to be understood, not routed somewhere else. Real-Time Voice Translation helps businesses make that kind of voice support available to more customers, while agents stay focused on solving the problem.”

Shashi Upadhyay

President of Product, Engineering and AI at Zendesk

Zendesk’s Real-Time Voice Translation, which will be available to Zendesk Contact Center customers early next month through a closed Early Access Program, offers several other potential benefits. 

For instance, it could eliminate the need for dedicated multilingual agents, interpreters, and external translation services.

Additional benefits may include:

• More flexible call routing: Calls can be routed based on the customer’s issue and agent expertise, rather than automatically sending customers to a language-specific queue or interpreter.
• Fewer transfers and shorter waits: By removing the need to automatically transfer customers to language-specific queues or interpreters, translation can help reduce wait times and unnecessary handoffs.
• Better coverage during demand fluctuations: The solution addresses differences in language demand across regions, time zones, and peak periods, reducing coverage gaps and routing friction.
• Easier market expansion: Real-time translation gives businesses a way to extend voice support to new communities and markets without building a dedicated multilingual workforce for each one.

Nevertheless, while Zendesk may be ahead of the curve, expect such technologies to become commonplace in the coming years, with Cisco also set to release a similar solution. 

What’s most interesting, however, is that contact centers may need such agent-facing innovations sooner rather than later - as AI isn’t having the impact on contact volumes that many expected...

Human Contact Center Voice Interactions Are Rising, Not Falling

Zendesk research suggests customer-facing AI agents aren’t reducing the number of contacts reaching human agents. Instead, they’re increasing them. The graph below illustrates this. 

On average, the organizations surveyed had automated 41% of interactions with Zendesk AI. Yet, since implementation, their overall contact volumes had nearly doubled.

Overall, this suggests that when customer service becomes faster and more reliable, customers use it more and reach out with queries they might previously have left unresolved.

Therefore, human agents may end up handling more queries, not fewer.

That’s a concern when many contact centers are planning to reduce headcount because of AI. 

If this is the case, those agents will need all the support they can get, making the Agent Assist toolkit, with tools like real-time translation, increasingly important.

More on the Zendesk Contact Center 

For many, Zendesk is a CRM application. However, in May 2025, it launched the Zendesk Contact Center to target enterprises. Now, the solution has more than 100 customers. 

Nevertheless, its ambitions are much greater, with the vendor ratcheting up innovation across the platform so that when renewal time comes along, more of its 160,000+ paid customers will adopt the solution.

When they do so, they can converge CCaaS, CRM, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance (QA), and conversational AI under one roof. 

In one connected ecosystem, this promises to unlock a firehose of data to support the next generation of customer and employee experiences.