Sushil’s Karma: Notes on AI Persona Design

There is this company I did an AI/UX audit for, which provides a virtual AI secretary that takes all your calls. If it is relevant, it passes the call onward to your phone. It detects spam and unwanted calls and saves you from all that hassle.

When I called the company’s phone number, the sound that I heard was very human. Indian female, North Indian accent. She told me the features and the pricing plans, with ambient noise around her and keyboard sounds. I have written another post about this particular aspect — the typing sounds and the waiting thereby. However, I realized this: I, as a user of this product, want an AI agent. I might not want Sunita from Delhi. Of course, if someone called my number, they should hear Sunita. Many of those callers do not know that such AI callers exist. They should believe I have a human secretary working in an office, with a computer in front of her.

What if Sunita had told me this: “I will be the one to handle any calls to you. You could also choose Kavita or Sunil. Would you like me to switch the call to them?”

But there is another scenario. What if I do not need a human persona as a secretary? I am subscribing to the service of a virtual AI secretary, is it safe to assume I will always want a human voice? What if I would want a non-human, robotic voice, like R2D2? What would be the benefits of this, one could ask. Assistants have always been at the receiving end of their boss’s emotional outlet. If a client makes them angry, that suppressed anger comes out on assistant Sushil. Though ideally this should not be the case, what if someone wants a virtual AI secretary just because they don’t want to get more bad karma by abusing their human help? Scolding a robotic voice may be preferable to some. This is just one scenario which came to mind. The question is whether anyone has done any studies to find out more. Why is it always different types of human sounds being shown in voice personas?

Of course, all AI voice agents have plenty of different voices in different accents. But this should be the first real choice, before deciding between those. The very first choice should be this — do we need a human voice at all? Many other things are connected to this. If I know my secretary is virtual, then the fake typing sound would go. It would know most information, at least relevant to me, almost instantaneously. Why would I spend money to hear my AI secretary typing without writing anything?

There should be ambient noise though, to make sure the call hasn’t dropped when there is a moment of silence in the conversation. Maybe I should be able to choose between white noise, green noise, or black noise, because I may be hearing that noise for a substantial time period every day.