Tamil is not an afterthought in Sri Lanka. For shops in Jaffna, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Nuwara Eliya and much of Colombo, it is the language the customer is most comfortable buying in.
Script and romanised Tamil
As with Sinhala, many customers type Tamil using English letters rather than Tamil script. A good agent answers in whichever the customer used and never mixes the two inside one message.
The failure to watch for
Tamil sits among several visually similar Indic scripts, and weaker models slip characters from Bengali, Devanagari or Gujarati into otherwise correct Tamil. To a Tamil reader that is visible garbage, and it is common enough to be worth testing for deliberately.
It is not a theoretical risk. Agent Kesh hit exactly this in production — Tamil replies containing Bengali and Gujarati letters — which is why Tamil was moved onto the premium model and a code-level check now rejects any reply containing a script that does not belong.
How to test a tool in two minutes
- 1Ask a normal shopping question in Tamil script and read the reply aloud. Does it sound spoken or like a legal notice?
- 2Ask the same thing in romanised Tamil and check it answers the same way.
- 3Look closely at the characters for anything that is not Tamil.
- 4Check the currency is LKR or ரூ., never the Indian rupee symbol.
That last point catches a surprising number of tools. Models reach for ₹ when writing South Asian languages, and quoting Indian rupees to a Sri Lankan customer is simply wrong.