Persona & Voice
The configurable instruction blocks that define your bot's identity, voice, and global behavior — persona, tone, writing style, language, and safety guardrails. Tuned defaults out of the box; override only when you have a reason.
Your bot's persona and voice are set by a handful of instruction blocks at the very top of its system prompt — the preamble. They define who the bot is, how it sounds, what language it writes in, and the guardrails it always observes.
Like bot rules, these blocks are always-on: they're present on every turn of every conversation. Unlike bot rules, you rarely need to write them yourself — each ships with a carefully tuned default. This page is about what they do, when to change them, and the one behavior that trips people up.
You'll find all of these under AI & Automation → Configuration in the dashboard. For how the preamble fits into the wider system prompt, see the Bot Operating Model.
How the blocks work
Each block is edited independently. Leave one blank and the bot uses Octocom's default for it. The defaults are good — most strong bots never touch them.
Overriding a block replaces its default — it does not add to it. When you write your own Tone, your text becomes the entire Tone instruction; the default is gone. This matters most for Safety and Instruction following: if you override those, you're now responsible for the guardrails the default used to provide. Carry over anything important.
So the healthy posture mirrors the discipline for bot rules: don't touch these unless you have a concrete brand, voice, or policy reason. A blank block isn't an empty one — it's a well-tuned one.
Everyday settings
These are the blocks you're most likely to touch, and the dashboard surfaces them first.
Business description
The most direct way to shape the bot's persona. A plain-language, high-level overview of your company and what it does — the bot uses it as context for who it is and what it represents. Reach for this field first when you want the bot to "know your brand"; you rarely need anything more.
Keep it an overview, not a data dump. In particular, this is not the place to list your products — unless you genuinely sell only a handful. The bot already searches your catalog on demand (see the Bot Operating Model), so pasting product lists here just bloats the top of every prompt with information the bot doesn't need always in mind. Like bot rules, the business description is always-on real estate — keep it lean.
Tone
The bot's emotional register. The default is friendly and warm. Customize to shift it — more formal and corporate, more playful, more concise-and-neutral — to match your brand.
Writing style (email and chat)
How the bot actually composes replies: length, formality, formatting habits. There are two styles, email and chat — and the chat style applies to everything that isn't email (web chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, and so on). Only one is ever active at a time: the bot uses the email style on email, and the chat style on every other channel. This lets you keep non-email conversations terse and conversational while letting email be fuller and more structured. Customize the right one rather than trying to cover everything in one place.
Language & grammar
Governs language behavior: reply in the customer's language, transliteration handling, and similar rules. The default handles multilingual support well. Customize only if you need to constrain or steer language behavior for your audience.
Advanced settings (change with care)
The dashboard tucks the remaining blocks behind an Advanced Configuration section, collapsed by default — and for good reason. These define the bot's core behavior and guardrails. The defaults are carefully tuned, and a careless override here can degrade the bot or strip out protections you didn't realize you were relying on.
Treat these as a last resort. Most bots never need to touch them. Each field has a Reset button that restores the default — use it if an edit doesn't clearly help. And remember that editing replaces the default outright (see above), so anything you remove is genuinely gone.
Safety
The bot's guardrails — staying on-topic, not making unauthorized commitments, and similar protections. Overriding this replaces the default guardrails, so only do it deliberately, and make sure your version keeps the protections you still need.
Instruction following
How the bot prioritizes its sources of truth — for example, that workflow instructions outrank articles, and that the bot shouldn't introduce outside information. Foundational behavior; override carefully.
Function calling
How and when the bot uses tools. The default already adapts to whether your workflows are embedded or loaded on demand (see the Bot Operating Model). You almost never need to override this, and a bad override can stop the bot from calling tools correctly.
Output syntax
The mechanical formatting rules — markdown expected, no raw HTML, no tables, and so on. Touch it only if your channel has specific rendering constraints.
Task instructions
The deepest override: it replaces the bot's entire core persona instruction — who it is, that it acts as a customer service agent, how it handles being asked whether it's an AI. To shape persona, prefer the Business description field above — it informs the persona without discarding the tuned default. Reach for Task instructions only when you need to rewrite that foundation wholesale, and note that doing so bypasses the automatic business-name and anonymization handling built into the default.
Where does it belong: config block, bot rule, or workflow?
Persona and voice settings overlap in people's minds with bot rules, so it's worth being clear about which tool fits what. This extends the decision guide in Bot Rules:
| If you're setting… | Use… |
|---|---|
| The bot's baseline voice, identity, or default global behavior | A config block (this page) |
| A discrete, always-on guardrail ("never promise specific delivery dates") | A bot rule |
| Behavior tied to a specific scenario | A workflow |
| A fact the bot looks up when relevant | The knowledge base |
Concrete contrast: "be warm and concise" belongs in Tone / writing style, not a bot rule. Pouring voice instructions into bot rules wastes scarce rule slots and fragments the bot's character across two places — set the character once, here.
Gotchas
- Override replaces the default. Worth repeating, because it's the most common surprise — especially for Safety and Instruction following, where a careless override can quietly remove protections.
- A config block can't do the impossible. The same limits apply as for bot rules: it can't grant the bot a capability (tools come from workflows), can't make it act outside the per-message loop (e.g. "follow up later"), and can't switch off intrinsic LLM behavior. See Bot Rules → common gotchas and the Bot Operating Model.
- These are guidance, not guaranteed code. They strongly shape behavior, but they're natural-language instructions to a model. For anything that must hold every time (strict auth, exact monetary or conditional logic), use condition providers and custom Python actions.
- Be explicit, not impressionistic. Vague instructions get vaguely followed. "Keep paragraphs under about three sentences" beats "write shorter"; principles beat one-off examples. (Same lesson as bot rules — see its gotchas.)
- For finer per-channel behavior, lean on the separate chat/email writing styles, and use channel-scoped bot rules for anything beyond voice.
Managing
- In the dashboard: AI & Automation → Configuration. Each block is a field you can edit or clear (clearing restores the default). The same screen also holds model selection and reliability settings — covered in the Bot Operating Model.
- Programmatically: via Octocom MCP (
get_bot_config,update_bot_config).