01Where machine-written Romanian gives itself away
Three things betray a Romanian reply, and none of them is deep grammar. The first is diacritics. The Romanian Academy treats ș and ț written with a cedilla (ş, ţ) as incorrect and requires the comma-below forms, and Unicode says the comma-below form is the one preferred for Romanian (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_alphabet). Some sites still print the cedilla because of old fonts, so look at what the chat window actually shows. The second is the sentence built in English and carried over word by word: a stiff "Cum vă pot ajuta astăzi?" opening every single reply, or English terms your own customers never use. The third is formats: 2.997 EUR with a dot for thousands, 15.10.2026 for dates, a 24-hour clock.
- Comma-below ș and ț are the Romanian standard; the cedilla ş and ţ are what old fonts print
- Some customers type without diacritics, so the assistant has to read both and answer in correct spelling
- Stock English-style openers and untranslated terms are the quickest tell
- Prices, dates and hours should look exactly as they do on your own site
02Tu or dumneavoastră: pick one and keep it
Romanian forces a choice English never asks for. Tu is familiar, dumneavoastră is the respectful form, and the in-between dumneata is marked "less formal, possibly confrontational" in the pronoun table on Wikipedia's T-V distinction page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction), so it is a poor pick for a bot. The choice belongs to the business, not the model. A dental clinic, a law firm or an accountant should write dumneavoastră. A gym, a cafe or a streetwear shop can use tu. The real failure is drift: the reply opens with "Bună ziua, vă mulțumim" and three messages later says "te sun eu". Write the rule into the assistant's instructions and test it with a customer who uses tu first.
- Choose tu or dumneavoastră for the whole business and write it into the instructions
- Skip dumneata: the reference table flags it as possibly confrontational
- Test with a customer who writes tu to a formal business
- Keep the same form in the greeting, the answer and the handoff message
03A ten-minute test before you buy
Ask the vendor for a live chat loaded with your own services and prices, not a demo video, and open it on your phone, because that is where most of your customers will meet it. Then send the messages below in order and read each reply slowly. You are not grading creativity. You are looking for the small tells that make a Romanian customer decide nobody here speaks their language, and for the reply that matters most: what the assistant does when it does not know. Ask for the transcript afterwards and keep it next to your other quotes.
- Send "Buna, cat costa o programare sambata?" with no diacritics: it should understand and reply in correct Romanian
- Ask the same thing in tu, then in dumneavoastră, and check which form comes back and whether it holds
- Ask something your information does not cover: it should say so and offer a person, not invent an answer
- Send one messy message with a typo and two questions in it
- Compare every price, date and opening hour with your own site, character by character
04Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice
PROOF48's AUTOMATE plan costs 2,997 EUR a month and covers website chat, DM and email auto-responders, booking automation and a CRM. If you get only a handful of messages a week, a well-written FAQ page costs less and does the job. If your customers reach you mainly on WhatsApp or by phone, AUTOMATE does not cover those channels: they are separate projects, priced on request. And if every conversation needs a human judgment call, an assistant will be wrong more often than right, which is why we refuse builds we can see failing from day one. We also have no named-client chatbot case study to show you yet.
- AUTOMATE, 2,997 EUR a month: website chat, DM and email auto-responders, booking automation, CRM
- A few messages a week: a good FAQ page is the cheaper answer
- WhatsApp or phone as your main channel: outside AUTOMATE, scoped separately on request
- Every conversation needs human judgment: we turn the build down
Language work we have shipped, and what we have not
None of our eight written-up builds is a chatbot, so we will not pass one off as evidence. The closest language work we have shipped is Korean Cosmetics, a store and app that runs in 12 languages, where every product claim was rewritten across all 12 for EU cosmetics regulation. That is the standard we would hold a Romanian assistant to: each line checked in the language it appears in. We publish no result for an AUTOMATE chatbot, because we have no named-client case study yet.
See the build: Korean CosmeticsQuestions, answered
Does an AI assistant need diacritics to understand Romanian?
It should not. Some people type without them, which is why the test above sends one message with diacritics and one without, then compares the answers.
Who decides between tu and dumneavoastră?
The business does, once, for every channel. The assistant follows the rule written into its instructions, and you can check it when you read the conversations each week.
Does PROOF48 publish a score for how natural its Romanian sounds?
No. We do not measure one and will not estimate it. The ten-minute test lets you judge on your own messages instead.
Where PROOF48 fits
An AI assistant sounds natural in Romanian when four things are settled in advance: comma-below diacritics, one chosen form of address, the words your customers actually use, and formats that match your site. Test all four with your own messages before paying anyone. PROOF48's AUTOMATE plan, at 2,997 EUR a month, covers the website chat, and it is the wrong buy if you get only a few messages a week.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.