Agora + Genesys Cloud: Forward Detected Language → `speaker_locale`

Audience: Genesys Cloud administrator or developer building a multilingual contact center flow
Time to integrate: ~15 minutes
Date: 2026-03-20

What this does

Genesys Cloud Architect flows can detect a caller's language via the DetectLanguage or Set Language actions — setting it right at the start of the interaction. Agora's speaker_locale session parameter accepts BCP-47 natively. Forwarding what Genesys already knows unlocks precision temperature routing, improving confidence calibration by up to 13.5% ECE for native English speakers and up to 86% ECE for Germanic and high-T accent groups.

No extra language detection. No audio analysis. Just pass the signal Genesys already has.

Integration

The pattern: at the start of your Architect flow, read the detected language, then POST it to Agora via a Data Action webhook when creating the session.

Step 1: Capture language in your Architect flow

Use the DetectLanguage action (or Set Language if you set it manually) early in your inbound call flow. The result is stored as a conversation language attribute in BCP-47 format (e.g. en-US, de-DE, ar-SA).

If you're already routing callers to language-specific queues, the language is set. You don't need to re-detect it — just read it.

[Call Start]
    → DetectLanguage action (or Set Language from IVR selection)
    → language stored as conversation attribute: e.g. "en-US"
    → [Create Agora Session] ← Data Action webhook

Step 2: Create a Data Action to call Agora

In Genesys Admin → Integrations → Actions, create a new custom Data Action with the following configuration:

Request:

POST https://api.agora.ai/v1/sessions
Authorization: Bearer {{YOUR_AGORA_API_KEY}}
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "speaker_locale": "${flow.detectedLanguage}",
  "caller_phone": "${flow.ani}"
}

flow.detectedLanguage — the BCP-47 language set by DetectLanguage / Set Language in your Architect flow
flow.ani — caller's phone number in E.164 format (optional; used as fallback if language is null)

Response mapping:

{
  "session_id": "$.session_id",
  "t_class": "$.t_class",
  "optimal_T": "$.optimal_T"
}

Step 3: Call the Data Action from your flow

In your Architect flow, add a Call Data Action step after language detection:

[DetectLanguage]
    → [Call Data Action: Create Agora Session]
        input:  flow.detectedLanguage → speaker_locale
                flow.ani             → caller_phone
        output: session_id stored as flow.agoraSessionId

Store the returned session_id as a flow variable — pass it in all subsequent Agora API calls for this interaction.

That's it.

What Agora does with it

| Language detected in Architect | Agora routes to | ECE vs baseline | |-------------------------------|-----------------|-----------------| | en-US, en-GB, en-AU, en-CA, en-NZ, en-IE | T=1.0 (Native EN) | −13.5% | | de-DE, de-AT, nl-NL | T=2.0 (Germanic) | −86% | | fa-IR | T=1.5 (Farsi) | — | | ar-*, hi-IN, ur-PK | T=6.5 (High-T) | −84–85% | | ta-IN, te-IN | T=3.25 + WER flag | — | | anything else / null | T=4.0 (standard default) | baseline |

Unknown BCP-47 tags fall through to T=4.0 — no errors, no broken sessions.

Why not let Agora detect locale automatically?

Automated native EN detection via Whisper confidence signals tops out at 64% precision — not good enough for production routing. Explicit speaker_locale achieves ~95%+ precision with zero latency cost. Genesys already does the language detection work in your IVR; you just need to pass the signal downstream.

Notes

speaker_locale is session-level. Set it once at session creation; it applies to all requests in that session.
If DetectLanguage returns null (e.g. caller hung up early, detection inconclusive), Agora defaults to T=4.0 — safe, no action required.
If your flow doesn't use language detection today but does route callers to language-specific queues (e.g. "Press 2 for Spanish"), the queue assignment implies a locale. You can map queue name → BCP-47 and pass it via Set Language before calling the Data Action.
caller_phone (ANI) is optional. If speaker_locale is null, Agora falls back to deriving a locale estimate from the E.164 country code (~80–85% precision for Native EN). This is a zero-effort fallback — Genesys exposes ANI on every inbound call.
For per-request locale overrides (multi-speaker sessions), see the Agora API spec — planned for v1.1.

Questions? → [agora docs] or reach out directly.

Agora + Genesys Cloud: Forward Detected Language → speaker_locale