#6 The Secret Behind Scalable AI Characters

After user research and quantitative testing comes the real force multiplier: a design system that lets every team spin up on-brand AI characters without reinventing the wheel. Phoebe explains why a system is more than a style guide and how it becomes the shared language for voice, visuals, and behavior across markets.

Highlights

- Style guide ≠ design system – how reusable assets, research-backed rules, and governance turn a static brand book into a living toolkit that accelerates creative work instead of policing it.

- Core building blocks – voice-tone tokens, expression libraries, “basic pause” timing, fallback-response prompts, error-recovery patterns, earcons, and perception-test templates.

- Begin with the end in mind – anchoring the system to the company’s mission so every asset (from TTS voice profiles to UX flows) ladders up to the same north star.

- Politics & practicality – picking the right contributors, defusing naming battles, and using data (not opinions) to resolve push-pull between global consistency and local nuance.

- Lightweight → enterprise-grade – why a starter kit of reusable prompts is still a design system, and how it can grow into code packages, speech-data pipelines, and performance benchmarks.

- Scalable guidance, not rigid rules – giving regional teams research frameworks and analysis tools to localize characters while staying unmistakably on-brand.

If you’ve nailed a single AI character and are wondering, “How do we replicate this across products, languages, or markets without chaos?”—this episode shows how to turn hard-won insights into a system that scales creativity rather than stifling it.