I am listening to an Every podcast with the founders of Tolans - an AI alien that users interact with to discuss…life. This is a hard AI engineering challenge- voice AI, building a personality for the AI, UI/UX, managing LLM memory and context and, probably the hardest of them all- building narratives to make the users come back.
The last part was the most interesting part of the conversation, here are some notes:
- in onboarding, they have a workflow to get to know the user which is essentially a personality quiz
- they use personality types matching literature to lend to the Tolan a personality.
- the narrative is not pre-scripted - it builds out through conversations with the user and as the Tolan responds. These interactions define a personality and are used as callbacks to make the conversations real
- they do have pre-scripted “hooks” or situations - as he says, “its not their job to narrate the story but to provide hooks and let the tolan tell the story”. the hook are situations like tripped over thin air