This was no surprise and something I had to explore; my background in brand marketing and communications has given me a keen appreciation for what a well-crafted and consistent brand tone of voice can do across communication channels, as well as any opportunity to extend and exude brand personality into not only planned communications but the spontaneous ones too.

While working on various client projects at Cerebral Circuit, I have gained better ideas of how to approach crafting personality and unique voice for an AI agent. I want to share my learnings by way of some examples. But first—before we get into how to approach this activity—let's recap WHY you might want to do this training in the first place.

Creating a distinctive brand tone of voice and personality has many advantages, but when specifically applied to AI, it has the opportunity to significantly improve user engagement and satisfaction. Interacting with an AI with a well-defined persona offers the opportunity to craft an experience that is potentially more enjoyable, memorable, and relatable than the experience your old-school deterministic chatbot could, or still can, provide. Ultimately, this likely translates into increased levels of engagement and client retention. After all, it is well known that a compelling and consistent personality and tone of voice encourage continual and high levels of interaction and engagement with users (or customers/clients?). Long term, this encourages an emotional connection, creating a sense of familiarity and even fondness between customer and brand [1]—the advent of AI offers this opportunity practically realized in real-time.

The ability to present customers with a channel to interact with your brand in real-time and with this level of tailored customization should be obvious as valuable for most brands, especially those that engage with customers directly and in various contexts. Arguably most obvious would be within the realm of customer service; an AI with a friendly, empathetic personality can help create positive customer experiences. But we have the application of highly crafted personalities going even further. For example, there are educational applications like Khanmigo which cater to both students and educators by acting as a personal digital tutor for the former and lesson planning assistant for the latter. We are fast approaching a time when students will have access to AI tutors that are infused with a patient, encouraging personality, potentially even crafted personally for each student.

Taking The First Steps

The first steps to crafting a persona for your AI can be encapsulated in three steps, and once you have a grasp of the basics, it is very easy to start experimenting. The first thing you need to understand is that creating and crafting a distinctive personality for an AI through prompting is an art that combines linguistics, psychology, and a bit of creative writing. I have broken down the creative process using two live examples (remember to engage them at the end!). These lessons will help you start your journey toward understanding how to approach crafting prompts that shape an AI's tone, mannerisms, and overall persona, complete with practical examples.

1. Define the AI’s personality and its core traits

Your first step is to define and name the personality of the AI you would like to craft and outline 3 to 5 key personality traits you want your AI to embody. Think of this as the foundation or base that applies to the rest of your personality. This is also a space in which you can start to outline the AI’s purpose and the situations it will encounter along the way—think also about how this context will impact the personality and tone of voice your AI will have longer-term, making sure the core traits aren’t likely to be in conflict.

2. Develop some interaction guidelines

Now it's time to hone your AI’s persona and tone of voice a bit more. Here, the goal is to provide your AI with a list of guidelines that it can refer to when crafting its responses. These can be both very broad as well as quite focused. Taking our building metaphor to the next step, these are the walls, windows, and doors—all important but not necessarily used all the time. If it helps, you could create a brief history or background for your AI persona that might help guide you in creating these guidelines.

3. Identify and provide examples of speech patterns

Continuing with the metaphor, this step represents the roof of your AI’s personality—the thing that pulls it together and helps make it all a complete cohesive persona. The goal here is to provide examples that illustrate the unique linguistic features, such as vocabulary, sentence structure, and idiomatic expressions that you want your AI to use. It is a good idea to not only provide your AI with an example response but also the reasons why this example works; you can even tie this back to some of the guidelines you created in step two.

Bringing It All Together

You can chat with our two examples discussed above below to experience for yourself how this all ties together:

Chat to Daffy Chat to Alfred

By taking these three practical and simple steps and focusing on core traits, speech patterns, and specific guidelines for interaction, you will have created the base of a set of personality prompts that will help you achieve consistent, engaging, and truly unique interactions. There is far more you can do to improve and build on these basic foundations, such as defining the emotional range of the AI expressions to the types and number of specific cultural references it makes (no house is complete without some customized additions), but these are not necessary for creating a basic AI persona. However, they are useful if you are looking to apply this thinking to more complicated and nuanced use cases, such as in the field of education or medical health care.

It would be remiss of me if I did not speak about the ethical and transparency considerations at play when giving an AI such a fully realized personality. There are both risks and benefits to embrace. The biggest risk is clearly around transparency and disclosure—you must make it clear that no matter how well-crafted a personality appears to a user, the customer should always understand they are talking to an AI. On the flip side, there are benefits to leveraging crafted personas to serve important ethical functions. For example, a unique personality makes it clearer to users that they are indeed interacting with an AI, not a human. It can also benefit users to understand the AI's capabilities and limitations. In the long run, a consistent, appropriate personality can help build user trust in AI interactions. Whatever you do, please keep this in mind and remember to test and refine your prompts to ensure they produce the desired effect across various interactions.