How to set up a multilingual AI receptionist in France in 30 minutes

France is a multilingual market whether your business is in Paris, Marseille, Lyon or a small town on the coast. Tourists, expats, residents from the Maghreb diaspora — they all reach you in different languages. Most front desks pick up in French and hope for the best. Here is how to do better in 30 minutes.

Step 1 — Pick the four languages you actually need

Most French SMBs only need four:

• **French** — your default.
• **English** — tourists, business clients, expats.
• **Spanish or Italian** — depending on your region. Mediterranean coast: Spanish and Italian. Atlantic coast: English-only often suffices.
• **Arabic** — for the Maghreb diaspora and visitors from North Africa, especially in Marseille, Lyon, and the Île-de-France.

Adding more languages later is free in Janore — start with these four.

Step 2 — Feed the assistant your real FAQ

The fastest setup is the website import. Drop your URL into the start flow and Janore reads your "Contact", "Hours", "About" and "FAQ" pages in two minutes. If your website is thin, paste in your top 20 questions from email or SMS.

The trick: do not write a fresh FAQ. Use the actual questions customers asked you in the last 30 days. Real wording trains a better assistant than a tidy marketing FAQ.

Step 3 — Set the escalation rule

Two rules cover 90% of cases:

• **Emergency keywords.** "Burst", "leak", "pain", "urgent", "now" — these flag a chat for your phone or your team.
• **Booking confirmation.** When the assistant collects a booking, it can confirm immediately or queue for your human approval. Most businesses confirm immediately for routine slots and queue for groups, special requests, or after-hours.

Step 4 — Test in every language before you ship

Open the playground, switch language to each of the four, and ask the same five questions:

• "What are your hours?"
• "How much does X cost?"
• "I need help — it is urgent."
• "Can I book for Friday?"
• "Where are you located?"

If any answer is wrong or in the wrong language, fix the FAQ — not the prompt. The fix lives in your knowledge, not in code.

Step 5 — Embed and ship

Copy the embed snippet, paste before `</body>` on every page, and you are live. Most customers are live within an hour of signup, and tweaking takes another 30 minutes over the first week.

RGPD note

Janore is EU-hosted (Paris) and processes no data outside the EU. Your customers are covered without extra paperwork — the DPA is one click in your dashboard. For Business-tier customers, a co-signed DPA is auto-generated.

What good looks like after one week

Customers we tracked through onboarding hit:

• 60–80% of routine questions answered without human touch
• Average reply latency under 2 seconds
• 4 of 5 visitors finishing the first conversation (vs 2 of 5 with a static FAQ page)

The best part? The assistant gets better the more you fix the FAQ. Janore's role is to read what you wrote — yours is to write it well.