Pro Tips

The following tips can help in designing and implementing effective personality tags.

How to design a good personality tag

View your personality tags as a mechanism for drawing attention to certain pieces of content, it is not necessary to add personality tags to every sentence.

Begin with personality tags that specify markup that will span whole sentences and follow with emphasis personality tags where content requires additional attention.

As much as possible, you should aim to find commonalities across utterances and add these as personality tags. For example, you will likely always want your Digital Person to assume a positive expression when speaking about your company, regardless of the context. Similarly, questions are typically phrased using the same language constructions e.g. “Would you”, “Have you”, “Can I”, thus it is more efficient to add these as entries, rather than specific subjects. 

Length of personality tags

When authoring word-based tags or “short” tags, ensure that the entry is as succinct as possible so that the gesture is applied at the appropriate place. Let us use the following phrase as an example, “I've had a lot of fun chatting with you today.” If you wanted to add a short eyebrow raise at the appropriate time, you would want to target the right words. 

By creating an entry for “I’ve had a lot of fun,” you’ll end up seeing emphasis on the words “I’ve had” because the duration of the gesture won’t last the whole phrase. Instead, you should target the part of the phrase that you want to emphasize. In this case, “lot of fun”. It will feel more natural.

Gesturing towards content

We commonly use the East facing gaze gestures for identifying content or engaging with content and the West facing gaze gesture to indicate when your Digital Person is thinking or trying to explain something complex. 

In this case, entries should aim to be 4-5 words long, at least, to avoid false triggers. For example: “the link on the right” or “at the bottom of the screen”

Avoid duplicates

Always check for duplicate entries within a behavior, and between different behaviours. It’s possible to support this, but any duplicates should be intentional. They should aim to be complementary, not contradictory.

Punctuation

We will maintain an updated guide for punctuation that can be used in Personality Tags.

Please note: Your tag should always include the same punctuation as your corpus entry.