Glossary · Speech
What is code-switching in Hinglish calls?
Code-switching (Hinglish)
Code-switching is moving between two languages inside one conversation, often inside one sentence. Hinglish, the mix of Hindi and English you hear on so many Indian business calls, is the everyday example.
On a call
"आपका order confirm हो गया है, delivery कल evening तक होगी." That's one sentence, two languages. An agent built for pure Hindi stumbles on "confirm" and "evening"; one built for English can't say the rest.
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Explained
Here is how it works, in plain words.
Hardly anyone in an Indian city speaks pure Hindi on a business call. They say “payment”, “order”, “address” and “confirm” in English, and the grammar around them in Hindi. Linguists call it code-switching or code-mixing, and draw the line between the two in different places. Most people just call it Hinglish.
For a voice agent, it touches every part of the stack.
Speech recognition has to expect both languages at once. A model trained on clean Hindi can force “delivery” into a Hindi word that sounds close. A model trained on English loses everything around it. It also has to choose a script. Writing “delivery” in Roman and “कल” in Devanagari matches how people read it, but a test set that spelled it “डिलीवरी” will mark that as an error.
The language model has to reply in the same register. Shuddh Hindi on a phone call sounds like a government notice. Nobody says “भुगतान” when they mean “payment”.
The voice has to pronounce both. A Hindi voice that reads “evening” with Hindi vowels sounds like an accent. One that switches to a different speaker for English words sounds like two people. What you want is one person who code-switches, the way the caller does.
Researchers flag the same core problem across language pairs: there’s far less mixed-language training data than single-language data. A survey from 2019 covers the methods people use to work around that.
The practical test is simple. Play a real Hinglish call to the system and listen. If it sounds like a translation, it isn’t there yet.
In Frequency
This is what Frequency does about it.
Our voices switch into English the way people really talk, so a Hinglish sentence comes out in one voice with no change of accent. Our transcripts write Hindi words in Devanagari and English words in Roman script, the way the call sounded. Hindi, English, Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu are live on every call, and so is the Hinglish mix.