Spanish AI Voice Agents for E-commerce: Spain's New Rules

Spanish AI voice agents for e-commerce answer an online store's calls in Spanish, or in Spanish and English on one line. They answer policy and order questions after verification and hand over to a Spanish-speaking person. In Spain, Ley 10/2025 generally gives large companies' customers the right to a person on request, so the handover must work from the start.

Key Takeaways

• In Spain, large companies generally cannot run customer service on bots alone.
• Build the handover to a Spanish-speaking person before the Spanish prompts.
• Write the Greeting Text in both languages; detection starts after it.

This post is part of our guide to AI voice agents for e-commerce and retail. The guide's section on serving Spanish-speaking customers starts from one aim: a customer should be able to call in Spanish and reach a person who speaks it. Here is how that works on Dograh, an open-source, self-hostable voice agent platform, and why Spain's new law turns that aim into a requirement.

Two markets with different rules

A store meets Spanish-speaking callers in two settings, and the rules differ.

The first is a US or Latin American store answering customers in Spanish, or in both languages. The market is large: Mexico's online retail reached about 941 billion pesos in 2025, up 19.2% and 17.7% of retail sales, according to the AMVO online sales study reported by Marketing4eCommerce. AMVO is Mexico's online sales association. For a US store, the outbound rules are the same as in English: a cart or reorder call in an AI voice generally needs written consent, as AI voice agents for abandoned-cart recovery explains.

The second is a store selling to consumers in Spain. There, a new customer-service law sets the shape of the phone line for large companies. That law is the reason this post exists.

In Spain, a person is one request away

Spain's Ley 10/2025, which regulates customer service, came into force on 28 December 2025, and companies have twelve months to adapt, so until 28 December 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.

For companies selling to consumers, it generally applies when, in the previous financial year, they employed at least 250 people, had annual turnover above €50 million or a balance sheet above €43 million. Any one of those is enough, and it applies whatever channel the customer uses and wherever the call centre sits.

Article 8.1 is the line that matters for a voice agent: "Se prohíbe el empleo de contestadores automáticos u otros medios análogos como medio exclusivo de atención a la clientela." In English, automated answering may not be the only way customers reach service. Article 8.2 adds that a bot must let customers ask for "una atención personalizada", a real person, "en cualquier momento de la interacción, desde su inicio", at any point from the very start. That person must identify themselves when they come on.

The law also sets times. Under article 10.3, 95% of phone calls must be answered, on average, within three minutes, and a call does not count as answered unless the customer can explain why they are calling and ask for a person. Article 8.2 sets the same three-minute average for 95% of requests for a person.

So, in general, a voice agent can answer first, but it can never stand between the customer and a person. Check with counsel whether the law covers your store.

Build the handover first

Design the transfer to a Spanish-speaking person before you write a single Spanish prompt.

Tell the agent, in its prompt, that any request for a person ("quiero hablar con una persona", "con un agente") is honoured at once, with no attempt to keep the caller. Transfer Call connects the caller to your team. It works on Twilio only and passes no summary by default. So the agent first writes the caller's name, order and request to the helpdesk in Spanish, through an HTTP API tool, and then transfers.

The Pre-Transfer Message plays fixed text before the transfer, so write it in Spanish: "Le paso con una persona de nuestro equipo." If nobody answers within the 30-second default, the caller stays with the agent; tell it in the prompt to offer a callback and write the request through an HTTP API tool. For a store in Spain's scope, the real answer is staffing the Spanish line so the three-minute averages hold.

Dograh's QA summaries are in English by default, so a Spanish speaker on the team should read the Spanish transcripts directly.

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Recording and sales calls in Spain

Two more Spanish rules touch a store's phone line.

On recording, article 12.1 of Ley 10/2025 says that when a customer raises a query or complaint by phone and gives express consent, the company "deberá grabar la llamada", must record the call, and tell the customer how to access it. In Dograh, recording cannot be switched off on Dograh Cloud and cannot wait for consent; self-hosted, recording can be turned off only server-wide, and transcripts are still saved. The Greeting Text can say the call is recorded, and a caller who objects can be handed to a person or the call ended.

On sales calls, article 66.1(a) of Spain's telecommunications law, Ley 11/2022, gives users the right "a no recibir llamadas automáticas sin intervención humana ... con fines de comunicación comercial sin haber prestado su consentimiento previo". An AI agent's cart or reorder call to a customer in Spain generally needs that prior consent. Confirm your position on both points with counsel before the first outbound campaign.

What changes in a Spanish store call

The call flow stays the same as in English: greet, verify, then disclose. What changes is the language setup.

In the agent's Model tab, set speech-to-text to Multilingual (Auto-detect) and tick Spanish, plus English for a bilingual line, under Language hints (available with Dograh's own models or Deepgram Flux), then pick a voice that speaks Spanish. Greeting Text plays before Dograh can hear the caller's language, so write it in both, for example "Hola, hello". Tell the agent in its prompt to ask which language the caller prefers when it is unsure, and to switch only once the caller confirms.

Store words are where Spanish calls go wrong. In the agent's Settings, open Dictionary, type product names, sizes such as "talla M", colours and SKU prefixes into the box (comma-separated) and click Save Dictionary. Upload the Spanish version of the return and shipping policy to the Knowledge Base, so answers come from the store's own Spanish text. Read back addresses and order numbers digit by digit before writing anything.

For which speech models handle Spanish well, see Spanish AI voice agents for logistics and delivery.

Where to start

Start with the support line, because that is where Spain's rules apply and where most Spanish calls land; AI voice agents for customer support in e-commerce covers what the agent settles and what goes to a person.

If your customers are in the EU, think about where the calls are stored. Dograh Cloud names no EU data region, so for EU data location, self-host Dograh in an EU data centre with the speech and language models running there too. Self-hosted Dograh has no per-minute platform fee (servers, model keys and phone minutes still cost); Dograh Cloud has a 1¢-a-minute platform fee.