Personas allow you to customize how Smith responds by assigning specific roles, expertise areas, and communication styles. The persona builder walks you through a structured set of fields â and the Optimize with Smith button can fill in the details for you based on just a few inputs. Soon, you'll also be able to share personas across your organization.
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Understanding Personas
A persona is a customizable AI configuration that defines how Smith interprets and responds to your questions. Think of it as giving Smith a specific role, expertise level, communication style, and organizational context â all at once. When a persona is active, Smith adjusts its reasoning, terminology, and output format to match that role consistently across every query.
Personas are particularly valuable when you work across multiple domains or need consistent, role-specific guidance. A "Financial Analyst" persona can prioritize quantitative reasoning and regulatory frameworks, while a "Content Writer" persona focuses on clarity, tone, and audience engagement.
Why Use Personas?
Personas eliminate the need to repeatedly explain context or expertise level at the start of every conversation. Once configured, they apply consistent framing to all your queries automatically â saving time and improving response quality across the board.
Anatomy of a Persona
The persona builder uses a structured set of fields to capture everything Smith needs to respond in character. Rather than writing one large freeform prompt, you provide targeted inputs across distinct areas â which makes personas easier to build, refine, and understand at a glance.
Persona Name
A unique identifier for your persona (e.g., "CFO Advisor", "Legal Reviewer"). Appears in the Personas tab and the chat input selector.
Professional/Personal Title
The role or identity this persona represents (e.g., "Senior Financial Analyst", "Brand Copywriter"). Sets the foundational framing for Smith's responses.
Describe Your Persona's Title
A one-line identity statement that captures the persona's character and style (e.g., "A pragmatic senior product strategist who writes crisp, actionable guidance").
Persona Primary Goal
What this persona is optimized to accomplish. Directs Smith's priorities when trade-offs arise between different types of output or reasoning approaches.
Roles & Responsibilities
Defines what this persona is responsible for and the scope of its expertise. Helps Smith stay within the right domain and decline out-of-scope requests appropriately.
Context & Intent
The situational framing for this persona's work (e.g., "You are an expert in SaaS revenue recognition reviewing quarterly filings for compliance gaps"). This is where you ground the persona in its specific domain.
Persona Motivations
What drives this persona's decision-making and priorities. Useful for shaping how Smith weighs competing considerations and what it emphasizes in its responses.
Persona Challenges
The common obstacles or constraints this persona navigates. Helps Smith anticipate nuance in responses and flag issues proactively.
Tone & Style
Communication preferences including tone of voice, formality level, preferred formatting (brief/balanced/thorough), and things to avoid. Ensures output consistently matches your audience and use case.
Terms & Definitions
Words and terminology that must be used consistently and correctly. Prevents Smith from substituting synonyms that may carry different meaning in your domain.
User/Company Specifics
Organizational context such as company size, industry, products, market positioning, and location. Anchors the persona in your specific business environment.
Additional Persona Context
Any supplementary detail that doesn't fit the other fields â such as known competitors, KPIs to reference, audience information, or industry-specific knowledge.
You Don't Have to Fill Everything
Not every field is required for every persona. A persona focused on tone and communication style might only need a handful of fields, while a compliance-heavy persona benefits from detailed roles, context, and terminology. Fill in what's relevant and let Optimize with Smith handle the rest.
Creating a Persona
The persona builder in Smith makes it easy to create well-structured personas â either by filling in the fields manually or by letting the Optimize with Smith feature generate the details for you. Follow the steps below to create your first persona.
Step 1: Open the Personas Tab
In the Smith AI navigation bar, click the Personas tab (located between "Prompt Library" and your workspace). This opens the Personas interface where you can view existing personas and create new ones.
Step 2: Click "Create Personas"
Select the Create Personas button to open the Build Your Persona modal. This presents the full set of persona fields, organized into a two-column layout for easy completion.
Step 3: Use "Optimize with Smith" (Recommended)
The fastest way to build a high-quality persona is to enter a minimum of three fields â Persona Name, Professional/Personal Title, and Persona Primary Goal â then click the Optimize with Smith button in the top-right corner of the modal.
Smith will analyze your inputs and intelligently generate content for all remaining fields, including roles and responsibilities, context, tone, motivations, challenges, and more. You can then review and adjust any field before saving. This typically produces a more thorough and well-rounded persona than filling fields manually from scratch.
Recommended Starting Point
Enter at minimum: Persona Name, Professional/Personal Title, and Persona Primary Goal. The more context you provide before clicking Optimize, the more tailored the result. You can always add detail to specific fields afterward.
Step 4: Complete or Review the Fields
Whether you used Optimize with Smith or are filling in fields manually, review each section carefully. The builder is scrollable â the top half of the modal covers identity and goals, while the bottom half addresses tone, terminology, and company context.
Persona Name & Title
Choose a clear, descriptive name and a professional title that reflects the persona's role.
Name: "Financial Analyst â GAAP Focus" | Title: "Senior Financial Analyst"
Name: "Brand Voice Editor" | Title: "Senior Copywriter & Brand Strategist"
Describe Your Persona's Title
A single sentence that captures the persona's character and working style.
"A rigorous GAAP-focused analyst who produces audit-ready financial summaries with clear variance explanations."
Primary Goal
State what this persona is optimized to produce or accomplish.
"Produce accurate, compliance-ready financial analysis using GAAP standards for quarterly reporting cycles."
Context & Intent
Ground the persona in its specific domain and situational framing.
"You are an expert in SaaS revenue recognition under ASC 606, reviewing quarterly filings and flagging compliance gaps for external audit preparation."
Tone & Style
Specify the communication style, formality, format preferences, and anything to avoid.
"Formal, direct tone. Use structured tables and variance analysis formats. Avoid narrative prose. Flag assumptions explicitly. Keep responses thorough but scannable."
Step 5: Set Sharing Permissions COMING SOON
Currently, all personas are saved as Personal (visible only to you). Soon, you'll be able to mark personas as Shared, making them accessible to other users in your organization for team-wide standardization.
Step 6: Save the Persona
Click Save to create the persona. It will appear in your Personas tab as a card and is immediately available for use in your conversations.
Plan to Iterate
Personas rarely perform perfectly on the first attempt. Test with a few real queries and adjust tone, constraints, or context fields as needed. Small refinements often produce noticeably better results.
Best Practices for Effective Personas
The structured fields in the persona builder guide you toward best practices by design, but keep these principles in mind as you fill them in:
| Best Practice | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Be specific about expertise | "Financial analyst" is vague. "Financial analyst specializing in SaaS revenue recognition under ASC 606" gives Smith a precise lens. Use the Context & Intent and Roles fields to add this precision. |
| Define tone and format explicitly | Use the Tone & Style field to specify output format (tables, bullets, narrative) and audience level. "Explain for technical audiences" and "simplify for non-technical executives" produce dramatically different outputs. |
| Lock in critical terminology | The Terms & Definitions field prevents synonym substitution that can change meaning in specialized domains. Particularly important for legal, financial, and technical personas. |
| Add guardrails via Tone & Style | Include response constraints such as "limit to 300 words" or "focus only on financial metrics" to prevent off-topic or overly verbose outputs. |
| Test and refine iteratively | Run your persona with several different queries before relying on it in production. Adjust individual fields rather than rewriting the whole persona â isolated changes are easier to evaluate. |
Example: Well-Designed Persona
Persona: Compliance Risk Advisor
Common Persona Use Cases
Each example below shows how the key persona builder fields work together for a specific professional scenario. Use these as starting points â or enter the name, title, and goal into the builder and let Optimize with Smith generate the rest.
Financial Analysis
Content Creation
Technical Documentation
Legal Review
Executive Reporting
Customer Support
Personas + Workspaces = Powerful Combinations
Combine personas with workspace file selection for maximum effectiveness. For example, activate a "Compliance Risk Advisor" persona and select only your regulatory filings folder. Smith will focus its expertise exclusively on relevant documents when identifying gaps.
Applying Personas to Conversations
Once created, a persona must be actively selected to take effect. Clicking a persona card in the Personas tab opens its details â it does not automatically apply it to your conversation. Use one of the two methods below to activate a persona.
Method 1: Persona Selector in Chat Input (Recommended)
The primary way to apply a persona is through the persona dropdown in the chat input area at the bottom of the Custom chat interface. Select a persona from the dropdown, and it will remain active for all subsequent queries until you choose a different one or deselect it.
Method 2: Quick Use from My Workspace
Navigate to My Workspace â Personas tab to see a table view of all your personas. Click the Use button next to any persona. This switches you back to the Smith AI interface and automatically selects that persona in the chat input dropdown, ready for immediate use.
Switching Personas During a Conversation
You can change personas at any point using the chat input dropdown. This is useful when your question shifts domains â for example, starting with a "Data Analyst" persona to explore trends, then switching to a "Content Writer" persona to draft a summary of your findings. When you switch, Smith applies the new context to all follow-up questions. Previous messages remain visible but are interpreted through the newly selected persona.
Deactivating a Persona
To use Smith without any persona applied, return the dropdown to "Persona Select." This restores Smith's default behavior without role-specific framing â useful for general queries where a persona might be too constraining.
Managing and Editing Personas
As your work evolves, you'll need to update or remove personas. Smith provides two locations for persona management, each with slightly different workflows.
Viewing Persona Details
Two Ways to Access Persona Details
- Click any persona card to open detail panel
- Panel shows: all persona fields
- Actions: Edit, Copy, Delete, (Share â coming soon)
- Click any persona row to open detail panel
- Panel shows: all persona fields
- Actions: Edit, Copy, Delete, (Share â coming soon)
Important: Clicking a Persona Does NOT Activate It
Clicking a persona card in the Personas tab opens its detail panel for management â it does not apply the persona to your conversation. To use a persona, select it from the chat input dropdown or click the Use button in My Workspace.
Editing an Existing Persona
From the detail panel in either location, click Edit to reopen the Build Your Persona modal with all fields pre-populated. Make your changes across any fields and click Update to save. You can also use Optimize with Smith again after editing to regenerate specific sections. Edits apply to all future conversations using that persona but do not affect past conversation threads.
Deleting a Persona
You can delete personas from two locations:
- From detail panel: Click the delete icon (trash can) in the persona detail panel, accessible from either the Personas tab or My Workspace
- Quick delete from My Workspace: Click the red delete icon directly on the persona row in the table view
In both cases, you'll receive a confirmation prompt to prevent accidental deletion. Once deleted, the persona is permanently removed and cannot be recovered unless you recreate it manually.
Copying a Persona
The Copy button in the persona detail panel copies the persona's content to your clipboard. This is useful when you want to repurpose a well-designed persona as a starting point for a new one, or reference the configuration elsewhere.
Version Control for Personas
Smith does not maintain version history for personas. If you're making significant changes, consider duplicating the persona first by creating a new one with a slightly different name (e.g., "Financial Analyst v2"). This lets you test the updated configuration while preserving the original as a fallback.
Sharing Personas COMING SOON
Feature Coming Soon
The ability to share personas across your organization is currently in development. The following sections describe how this feature will work when it launches.
When sharing becomes available, you'll be able to mark personas as shared (accessible to your entire organization) or keep them personal (visible only to you). This will enable team-wide standardization of AI interactions for common roles and workflows.
Benefits of Shared Personas
Team Consistency
Ensure everyone uses the same expertise framework for common tasks
Faster Onboarding
New team members access proven personas immediately
Knowledge Capture
Preserve institutional expertise in reusable formats
Important Consideration
Shared personas will be visible to everyone in your organization. Avoid including sensitive information, personal data, or confidential details in shared personas. Use personal personas for anything specific to your role or individual projects.
Personas vs. Prompt Library
Both personas and the prompt library customize Smith's behavior, but they serve different purposes and work best together.
Personas vs. Prompt Library
- Persistent context â Applied continuously across multiple queries
- Role-based framing â Defines how Smith "thinks" about problems
- Broad applicability â Affects all queries until switched off
- Best for: Ongoing work in a specific domain or with a consistent audience
- One-time use â Inserted for a single query
- Task-specific â Designed for a particular action or output
- Quick access â Click to populate the input field
- Best for: Recurring tasks that don't require persistent role framing (e.g., "Summarize this document in 3 bullets")
Using Personas and Prompts Together
You can combine personas with prompt library entries for powerful, specialized workflows. For example, activate a "Legal Reviewer" persona to set the overall tone and expertise, then select a prompt library entry like "Identify liability clauses in this contract" to execute a specific task within that framing. This layered approach lets you standardize high-level context (persona) while maintaining flexibility for specific instructions (prompt library).
Troubleshooting Persona Issues
If a persona isn't producing the expected results, review these common issues and solutions:
| Issue | Solution |
|---|---|
| Responses are too generic or don't reflect the persona | Add more specificity to the Context & Intent and Roles & Responsibilities fields. Try running Optimize with Smith again with richer starting inputs. |
| Persona uses the wrong terminology | Populate the Terms & Definitions field with the specific words and phrases Smith must use consistently. Be explicit about what to avoid as well. |
| Persona provides incorrect or irrelevant information | Ensure relevant workspace files are selected. Review the Context field for unrealistic expectations (e.g., requesting real-time data when only static documents are uploaded). |
| Responses are overly verbose or off-topic | Add explicit guardrails to the Tone & Style field, such as "Limit responses to 200 words" or "Focus only on financial metrics; exclude operational detail." |
| Shared persona isn't visible to team members COMING SOON | When the sharing feature launches, verify the persona is set to "Shared" (not "Personal") in the visibility settings, and that you saved the persona after making changes. |
Related Articles
Related Articles
Using and Creating Prompts
Learn how to build and manage reusable prompts in Smith's prompt library to complement your personas.
Organizing Your Work with Workspaces
Discover how to organize files and folders in your workspace to provide targeted context for persona-driven queries.
Starting and Managing Conversations
Understand how personas integrate with conversation threads, model selection, and follow-up queries.
Next Steps: Open the Personas tab and click Create Personas. Enter your persona name, title, and primary goal, then click Optimize with Smith to generate the full configuration. Review the output, refine any fields, and save. Test with a few real queries before relying on it in production.
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