Conversational AI is a whole new frontier for technology, and has incredible potential to change the way people interact with your company, brand or business.

Whether you’re seeking help with sales support, guidance, training, customer relations, entertainment or something else entirely – the process to create the perfect AI Agent follows a similar path.

This guide will take you on a simple five-step journey through those decisions, helping you to understand the thinking that goes into each one before you begin that process yourself…

The first thing to decide on is the problem or situation that your AI Agent should help with.

Does it need to explain complex information in a more targeted or engaging manner? Maybe it needs to listen to audience input and then provide a recommendation? Or maybe it just needs to respond to audio commands and trigger a specific response?

There are a wide array of potential use cases, so the first step is always to define who your Agent is helping, what they are helping them with, where your audience will encounter them (i.e. Website? App? In-person?) and how they should feel after interacting with it.

This will help you map out the user journey that will become the basis of your AI Agent experience.

Once you have decided exactly what role your AI Agent should play for your target audience, the next step is to decide how it should behave.

This covers everything from its ‘personality’ and ‘character’, to the way it should respond when prompted on something outside of its core purpose. This often takes the form of a series of ‘Do’s & Don’ts’, along with an overall style guide that, together, make up the system prompt that is fed into the LLM at the heart of your agent.

Agents for highly functional roles will benefit from a more rigid and strict set of instructions, whereas those intended for a more conversational setting should be given a little more freedom to ensure any exchange feels effortless and natural. Ultimately you can input almost any behaviour you want into your system prompt, provided it doesn’t breach any content moderation guidelines.

One of the most important steps in the Agent creation process is understanding what exactly it needs to know in order to perform its duties effectively. There are essentially two choices at this stage:

The first is to use a fixed ‘Knowledge Base’ as the key information resource that your Agent will access when answering questions. This is essentially a static reference point that doesn’t change over time, such as a company manual or set of product descriptions, and works best when you have a relatively straightforward role for your Agent.

The second option is to use a process known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation. This is a more complex knowledge pipeline that allows an Agent to draw information in real time from a dynamic reference point – such as a database, training record, or sales & marketing platform – and can even be integrated into third-party software such as Shopify or Salesforce.

In addition to one of these options, it’s also important to include any extra contextual knowledge that your Agent might need in order to give informed answers on the topics it will likely be asked about. Striking the right balance between providing enough knowledge to give good answers, while still remaining focused on the topic at hand, is a crucial part of the Agent-building process.

These knowledge-driven AI solutions are often introduced and demonstrated through online showcases and industry gatherings - explore related initiatives in our Virtual Events overview.

Only once you have decided on the fundamental functional aspects of your Agent is it time to move onto the more subjective aspects, such as appearance.

Here there are many more potential options to explore, as you must consider what kind of face you want to serve as the contact point between your business and your audience. Everything from the age, gender, and other physical traits must be selected, along with clothing, hairstyle, makeup and any other accessories.

There are also certain technical considerations to take into account, such as how much the agent should move their head and mouth, and how well certain hairstyles or clothing react to these movements. Every aspect of your Agent’s face can be controlled via a set of specific parameters, and achieving a natural-looking end product is a delicate process of fine-tuning each one.

This step is a painstaking, but a rewarding one, as your Agent gradually begins to take a recognisable form.

For teams that want to apply these steps in a structured, hands-on way, Journee also runs collaborative sessions focused on strategy, use cases, and implementation. Book a workshop to explore how these principles can be tailored to your specific goals.

The final step in the AI Agent design journey is to give it a voice.

While this might sound like a case of simply selecting an option from a list, the reality is that this is one of the most tricky parts of the process.

Human brains are very finely attuned to the relationship between physical appearance and sound. This means that your chosen voice needs to match your Agent’s appearance with a high degree of accuracy if the end result is to be believable.

Alongside broad categories such as age, gender and nationality, there are finer points to consider, such as accent, cadence, speed, and even the size of the ‘space’ in which the voice has been recorded. Get any of these wrong and your Agent will feel unnatural and unappealing to interact with.

Generating natural speech in real-time is also a very complex process, as voices that sound great with pre-generated material don’t always perform as expected in a live generation environment. Journee’s premium-quality text-to-speech technology works overtime to ensure that responses are as lifelike as possible, avoiding the monotone or robotic delivery often found in other real-time digital speech platforms.

Beyond technical accuracy, sustained engagement depends on how natural and rewarding the overall experience feels to users over time. To explore how immersive experiences can strengthen customer loyalty and long-term engagement, watch the customer engagement webinar.

Once you have completed these five steps, it is simply a matter of refinement, where your Agent’s behaviours and responses can be tested and adjusted to achieve the desired final outcome.

If this article has left you inspired, click here to get in touch with a Journee representative and begin the process of creating your own Conversational AI Agent with us!