Should your shop reply in Bangla, Banglish or English?

Updated 2026-07-26 · 7 min read

A customer writes: "vai eta ki original? dam koto?"

You reply carefully, in proper Bangla: "আসসালামু আলাইকুম। অনুগ্রহ করে আপনার পছন্দের পণ্যটির নাম উল্লেখ করুন।"

They never reply again.

The message was polite and grammatically correct. It was also the wrong language — not wrong as in Bangla versus English, wrong as in nobody talks like that in a shop.

Your buyers use all three writing systems

A Bangladeshi Facebook inbox runs on three, and the same person may use two of them in one conversation.

The mistake is treating the third row as a request for English. Somebody who types "price?" is saving keystrokes, not switching language.

Banglish wins because of the keyboard, not preference

The default keyboard on a mid-range Android phone in Bangladesh is English. Typing Bangla means installing a layout — Ridmik, Avro, Google's Bangla keyboard — then learning where the letters sit, then handling conjuncts, where a single যুক্তাক্ষর takes two or three taps.

Roman letters are already on the screen. So people who read Bangla perfectly well still type "apnar kache ki black color ache?", because nothing has to be installed or learned first.

Banglish is not a younger, sloppier Bangla. It is what Bangla looks like when it has to pass through a QWERTY keyboard.

The voice notes are a keyboard problem, not rudeness

Older buyers and buyers outside the big cities send voice notes because typing is genuinely hard for them. They never learned Roman transliteration and they do not have a Bangla keyboard. A message that would take three minutes to type takes fifteen seconds to say.

Answer those. Someone who could not face typing a message is also not typing the same message to four other pages.

Tanet Chat transcribes them. The audio is turned into text and then treated as an ordinary message, so the same FAQ matching, the same price answers and the same order capture all run on it. Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It needs an AI provider with an audio model set. If you bring your own API key, that is a field in the provider settings. If you are on the shared pool, it is switched on by Tanet Chat's operators, not by you.
• Each shop gets 100 minutes of audio a month. Past that, transcription stops until the next month.

When either of those is missing — and on any failure, including a slow provider — the agent falls back to asking the customer to type it. That fallback is not an error message: it asks in the customer's own language, warmly, and the conversation carries on.

People switch language mid-conversation, and it means nothing

A real conversation drifts:

Buyer:  vai dam koto?
Shop:   1450 taka. Unstitched three-piece.
Buyer:  Is the fabric cotton?
Shop:   Ji, 100% cotton. Dhaka'r vitore delivery 60 tk.
Buyer:  ok address dicchi

That buyer used English for the one question where the vocabulary is English anyway. They did not become an English speaker for eight seconds. If you had switched your whole voice to English at line three and stayed there, the conversation would have felt like it changed hands.

Match the register, not the sentence. Their length, their vocative — bhai or apu — their level of formality. Not your whole personality.

Formal Bangla makes a real shop look like a fake one

This is the part that actually costs money.

Written formal Bangla — "অনুগ্রহ করে আপনার সম্পূর্ণ ঠিকানা প্রদান করুন" — is the register of bank letters, government notices and SMS from an operator. It is not the register of a person selling you a three-piece.

Formal Bangla in a shop inbox does not read as respect. It reads as a template, which is exactly what a scam page also reads as.

Compare "আপনার ঠিকানাটা দিলে আমি আজই পাঠিয়ে দিচ্ছি." That is the same request, in Bangla script, and it sounds like a human being who owns the shop.

There is one formality rule you never relax: apni, never tumi. Even when the customer writes tumi to you. Apni is neutral and safe for every buyer; tumi is a gamble on their age and mood that you have no reason to take.

How Tanet Chat decides what to write

There is no language dropdown to puzzle over in setup. The step titled "How should your agent talk?" shows four replies to the same customer question, and you tap the one that sounds like your shop:

1. Warm and chatty — "Assalamu alaikum apu! Ei three-piece ta 1450 taka, unstitched. Ekdom fresh stock. Size ki lagbe bolen, ami dekhe rakhi?"
2. Short and quick — "Price 1450tk. Unstitched three-piece. Size?"
3. Polite and professional — full English, delivery time stated up front.
4. Pure Bangla — the same reply in Bangla script.

Showing the output works because nobody thinks about their own shop in adjectives. You cannot reliably answer "do you want a professional or a warm tone", but you can point at the one that sounds like you.

That single tap sets the agent's language, its tone and how long its replies run. From then on:

• Your voice is the house voice. A Banglish shop stays Banglish even when a customer writes in English. The customer's language is context, not an instruction to switch. That is stricter than you would be by hand, on purpose — a reply that changes script mid-thread reads as a different person picking up the conversation.
• Inside that voice, it matches the customer — their sentence length, their energy, and their vocative. If a buyer calls you "apu", any "bhai" in the draft reply gets swapped to "apu" before it sends, and the other way round.
• Apni is enforced after the fact, not just requested. Any tumi, tomar, tui or তুমি that slips into a reply is rewritten to apni, apnar, আপনি before the customer sees it.
• Messy spelling is read by sound. The agent is told that amy, ame and aamy all mean "ami", that daam and dam are the same word, that kemne and kmne are the same question — and never to claim it did not understand because of a typo.
• Banglish means Banglish, not Hindi and not translated English. Taka, not BDT. Vai or apu, not Dear Customer. Business words stay in English — delivery, order, confirm, payment, stock — because that is how Bangladeshis actually say them.

If you would rather set it by hand later, Agent setup → Persona has a plain Language field with exactly three values: Banglish as the default, Bengali in Unicode script, and English.

Check that field if you tapped Pure Bangla during setup. Bangla script only comes out reliably when Language reads Bengali (Unicode) — that is the value the reply engine recognises, and it is what turns on the Bangla-script writing rules.

What to do this week

• Read your last twenty replies. Count how many start with a formal Bangla or English greeting the buyer did not use. That is your leak.
• Write your house reply once, in Banglish, with apni. Price, delivery charge inside and outside Dhaka, delivery time, payment method — the four things every "dam koto?" buyer actually needs.
• Stop switching to English when the buyer sends one English word. Match their length instead.
• Answer the voice notes. They are the buyers nobody else is bothering with.

If you want that inbox handled at 11pm without you, Tanet Chat is invite-only for now and there is a free tier to test the voice on before you pay anything — see what the agent does with an order once the customer commits.