AI Receptionist That Speaks Mandarin and Hindi

Yes, an AI receptionist can answer your calls in Mandarin and Hindi. Frontly picks up in whichever language the caller speaks, answers their questions, books the appointment and records everything in your dashboard, any hour of the day. The calls that need a person go to your team, briefed and ready. For a business serving Australia's Chinese and Indian communities, it means every caller is looked after in the language they are most comfortable in, without hiring for every language you need.

Why does multilingual phone cover matter in Australia?

Because a large share of your callers prefer another language. At the 2021 Census, 22.8% of Australians used a language other than English at home, and Mandarin was the most common, spoken by 685,274 people. Hindi, Punjabi, Arabic and Vietnamese are spoken by hundreds of thousands more.

A caller who is not confident in English often does not leave a message. They hang up and ring the next business on the list. That call never shows up anywhere, which is why it is such an easy problem to miss.

Why not just hire bilingual staff?

Many businesses try, and it rarely covers the phone:

• The pool is small. A receptionist fluent in English and Mandarin, or English and Hindi, well enough to handle a medical booking or a tax question correctly, is hard to find.
• One person covers one shift. Calls arrive at lunch, after hours and on weekends, and one bilingual staff member cannot be on every one of them.
• You need more than one language. A clinic in Sydney or Melbourne may take Mandarin, Hindi and Punjabi calls in the same morning.

What does a Mandarin and Hindi speaking AI receptionist do?

The full front desk job, in the caller's language:

• Answers questions about your services, hours, fees policy and location, from your own information.
• Books, reschedules and cancels appointments during the call.
• Takes messages with every detail captured.
• Records every call in your Frontly dashboard with a transcript and an outcome.

In adaptive mode, Frontly hears the caller's language and answers in it, with no menu to press, and follows them if they switch languages partway through. Or give a community its own line, such as a dedicated Mandarin number. The full detail is on the voices and languages page.

Which businesses get the most from it?

Medical clinics and allied health. Patients book and change appointments in Mandarin or Hindi, so details are right the first time and fewer appointments are missed.

Real estate and property management. Buyers, investors and tenants enquire in their own language, and maintenance requests are described accurately, so the right trade is sent.

Accounting and tax practices. At tax time, clients get answers on what to bring and when to come in, and the calls that need advice go to their accountant.

Legal and migration practices. New enquiries are taken in the caller's language and passed to the right practitioner. Frontly handles the intake, never the advice.

What happens when a caller needs a person?

Frontly hands the call to the right member of your team and briefs them before it steps out, so the caller never starts again. If you have bilingual staff, the calls that need them go straight to them. How handover to a human works covers backup numbers and checking in with your team on Microsoft Teams or Slack first.

How do you set it up?

Pick a voice, choose the language mode and decide which calls should reach your team. Forward your existing number to Frontly and a standard setup is live in about an hour, set up with the Frontly team. Frontly covers more than 40 languages in total, as explained in multilingual AI agents for business and government.

The quickest way to judge it is to hear it. Hear Grace and Priya switch from English to Mandarin and Hindi, or place a free test call and try it yourself.

Sources

• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cultural diversity of Australia, released 20 September 2022, 2021 Census data. Checked on 4 October 2026.