Phone call language translations
Overview
Splunk On-Call can deliver voice notifications in your preferred language. When an incident is routed to you and your paging policy triggers a phone call, the system uses your configured language preference to deliver system prompts, instructions, and confirmations in that language instead of the default English experience.
This feature applies to phone call notifications only; SMS, push, and email notifications are unaffected.
Supported languages
| Language | Locale code | Region |
|---|---|---|
| English | en-US |
United States |
| Korean | ko-KR |
South Korea |
| Japanese | ja-JP |
Japan |
| Portuguese | pt-PT |
Portugal |
| Portuguese | pt-BR |
Brazil |
| German | de-DE |
Germany |
| Spanish | es-ES |
Spain |
| Spanish | es-MX |
Mexico |
English (en-US) is the default language. If your language preference is not set or is set to an unsupported locale, Splunk On-Call defaults to en-US.
How it works
- The system checks whether the
phonecalllanguagetranslationfeature flag is enabled for your organization. - If enabled, the system reads your stored phone call language preference.
- Your preference is mapped to a supported locale.
- The system delivers the phone call notification using translated system prompts and spoken instructions for that locale.
Language preferences are cached for up to 5 minutes. If you change your language setting, the change might not apply immediately to the next call.
What you hear during a phone call
A translated phone call notification generally follows this flow:
- Greeting from Splunk On-Call
- Incident details spoken aloud
- Instructions for available keypad actions
- Confirmation after you take an action
- Goodbye message
System prompts and action instructions are translated. Incident-specific data supplied by monitoring tools is spoken as originally sent.
Keypad actions
| Key | Action | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Acknowledge | Acknowledges the incident and stops further paging for that event according to your workflow. |
| 6 | Resolve | Resolves the incident when resolution by phone is supported for that incident type. |
What gets translated
| Component | Translated | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Greeting and goodbye messages | Yes | Standard Splunk On-Call call prompts are translated. |
| Keypad instructions | Yes | Prompts such as "press 4 to acknowledge" and "press 6 to resolve" are translated. |
| Confirmation messages | Yes | Messages confirming acknowledgment or resolution are translated. |
| Incident entity names | No | Entity names are passed through from source systems and are not translated. |
| Host names and alert payload values | No | Raw incident data is read as received from the originating integration. |
Prerequisites
- Your organization must have the
phonecalllanguagetranslationfeature flag enabled. This feature is not enabled by default; if the feature flag is not enabled, phone call notifications are delivered in English. - You must have a verified phone number in your user profile.
- Your phone contact method must be included in your personal paging policy.
- Your user profile must include a supported phone call language preference.
Limitations
- Phone call translations apply only to voice calls.
- Translations depend on supported telephony delivery paths and may not apply to all fallback providers.
- Only system-authored prompts are translated.
- Unsupported locale values fall back to English.
- Some message content might be truncated based on phone notification length limits.
- Speech quality may vary across languages due to differences in text-to-speech engine pronunciation support.
Frequently asked questions
- Why did I receive a call in English?
-
- The organization feature flag might not be enabled.
- Your language preference might not be set.
- Your saved locale might not be supported.
- Your recent change might still be within the cache window.
- Does this change SMS or push notifications?
- No. This feature affects phone call notifications only.
- Can incident data itself be translated?
- No. Splunk On-Call translates the system prompts around the incident, not the incident payload coming from your monitoring or observability tools.
- Do all users in an organization hear the same language?
- No. Each user can have an individual preferred language, provided the feature is enabled for the organization and the selected language is supported.