When your customers do not call in English: Armenian and Russian speakers in Los Angeles

Updated: August 2026 · Guides

Glendale, Burbank, North Hollywood, West Hollywood. In these neighbourhoods a business phone that only speaks English is quietly turning away regulars — not because they cannot speak English at all, but because ordering food in your second language over a noisy line is work nobody wants to do.

Why the phone is different from the dining room

In person, people manage. They point at the menu, they read the board, the server smiles and repeats. On the phone all of that disappears: no faces, no menu in hand, often a bad connection.

This is why an older customer who is perfectly comfortable in your dining room will still hang up when the phone answers in English only, and call the place that answers in Armenian.

What the big platforms actually cover

Most national answering products support English and Spanish. That is a reasonable choice for the country as a whole, and it is the wrong map for Los Angeles.

For a business in Glendale, Armenian is not an exotic extra — on some streets it is the first language of the customer base. Russian sits right next to it across large parts of West Hollywood and the Valley.

What "multilingual" should mean on a phone line

Ask any provider one specific question: what happens when the caller starts speaking a language other than the greeting? A good answer is that the assistant switches and stays in that language for the rest of the call.

Also ask what happens when it is not sure. The honest behaviour is to ask once, in plain words, which language the caller prefers — and to wait. An assistant that guesses and jumps between languages mid-call is worse than one that simply asks.

Armenian on a phone line is genuinely harder

Speech technology handles Armenian less confidently than English or Spanish, especially over a compressed phone connection. Any vendor who tells you otherwise has not tested it on a real call.

What works reliably today is a caller asking for the language by name — "do you speak Armenian?" — and the assistant switching from there. We test on live calls in Eastern Armenian, the variety spoken in Yerevan and across the Los Angeles community, and we say plainly where the limits are.

A small thing that matters

Whatever you use, it should introduce itself as an assistant rather than pretend to be a person. Customers do not mind talking to a machine that says what it is. They mind being fooled — and in California, if the call is recorded, both sides must be told anyway.

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