Subject: Multilingual ASR — Mandarin, Malay, Tamil support in multi mode

Feature Requests
1

Hi Retell team,

I’m building a voice caller targeting Singapore. Singapore has four official languages — English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil .==.

I’ve been testing language support and hit a wall I’d love your help resolving:

  • language: “multi” does not detect Mandarin (zh-CN) — it consistently maps Mandarin speech to Hindi transcription, suggesting Deepgram Nova-3’s
    multilingual pool doesn’t include Chinese.
  • language: “zh-CN” correctly detects Mandarin and also handles English, but doesn’t detect Malay or Tamil.
  • There’s no single language setting that covers all four languages simultaneously.

Specific questions:

  1. Is there a language configuration that supports auto-detection across English, Mandarin (zh-CN), Malay (ms), and Tamil (ta) in a single agent?
  2. Does using MiniMax as the TTS provider change which ASR engine is used — could multi + MiniMax route through MiniMax’s ASR rather than Deepgram?
  3. Is per-language voice routing (different voice_id per detected language) on your roadmap?
  4. If none of the above, is there an ETA on expanding the multi ASR pool to include Chinese and Southeast Asian languages?

This is a blocker for us and likely affects other Southeast Asian customers. Happy to jump on a call if useful.

Thanks