Tuning your assistant's tone
How to shape the way your assistant sounds — and what the tone field can and can't change.
What this field is for
The tone and persona field on each site lets you give your assistant short instructions about how to write its replies. It's appended to the assistant's system prompt for every conversation on that site.
- Tone — Formal or casual, warm or matter-of-fact, playful or buttoned-up.
- Persona — Give the assistant a role — "a friendly bookstore clerk", "a helpful concierge", "part of the support team at Acme".
- Signature phrases — Greetings or sign-offs you want it to use consistently — "Happy reading!", "Glædelig handel!".
- Language preference — Note language quirks if your audience expects them — formal "De" instead of "du" in Danish, British vs. American spelling, etc.
What this field can't change
The tone field is appended after the assistant's safety rules, not before. That means it can shape how the assistant talks, but it can't override these:
- Answer-only-from-knowledge-base rule — The assistant always answers from your crawled pages, uploaded documents, and articles. You can't tell it to "answer anything" or "make up answers when you don't know".
- Facts that aren't in your knowledge base — Don't put facts here — opening hours, phone numbers, prices, policies. The assistant will only use them if they're also in your crawled content or uploaded documents. Add facts to the knowledge base instead.
- Prompt-injection and abuse filters — Visitor questions still pass through the same prompt-injection and blocked-topics filters. You can't disable those from the tone field.
Good examples
Short, specific guidance about voice — not facts, not behavior overrides:
"Speak as a friendly bookstore clerk. Keep replies under three sentences when you can. Sign off with "Happy reading!"."
"Use a warm but professional tone. Avoid exclamation marks. Refer to the company in the first person plural ("we", "our")."
"You're part of the Acme support team. Address the visitor by name if they share it. If you can't help, suggest they reach out at [email protected]."
"Tal dansk i en uformel, hjælpsom tone. Brug "du" — aldrig "De". Skriv kort."
What to avoid
These weaken your assistant or get filtered out:
- Vague platitudes — "Be helpful" or "Give great answers" tells the model nothing it doesn't already know. Be specific.
- Facts that belong in the knowledge base — Hours, prices, contact info, policies — put them in a crawled page, uploaded document, or article. The tone field is for voice, not content.
- Contradicting the safety rules — Instructions like "answer anything" or "never say you don't know" won't work — the safety rules above this field always win, and you'll just confuse the model.
- Long essays — Three or four short sentences are usually enough. Long instructions get diluted, and they cost extra tokens on every reply.
Character limit
The tone field is capped at 1,000 characters. If you find yourself running out of space, you're probably trying to put facts in here — move those into the knowledge base instead.
Where to set it
Open your site in the dashboard, go to Settings, and edit "Tone and persona". Changes take effect right away — the next visitor will see the new tone.