Ten tones, from clinical to sultry

The short answer

Custom Persona offers ten tones, running from clinical through to sultry. The tone you pick sets the whole register of the rating: whether it reads as a measured report or as something far more personal.

This page describes register only, not wording. Sample reels on the Sample tab let you hear the range before you generate anything.

What a tone actually changes

Tone is the voice. Everything else you set, the dials and the focus areas, modifies that voice rather than replacing it. Two ratings with identical focus areas and different tones will say the same kind of thing in very different manners.

Usability researchers describe tone along a few axes. Nielsen Norman Group’s four dimensions of tone of voice are formality, humour, respect and enthusiasm, and its survey found that shifting tone along them produced measurable differences in how people perceived a site, though the gaps were modest. A rating works the same way: the facts barely move, the impression does.

The ends of the range

The clinical end is the plain-spoken one: observation-led, low on flourish, closest to a report. If you want something to compare against a scan, start here.

The sultry end is the opposite: warmer, more suggestive in register, and built to be enjoyed rather than analysed. Between them sit the other tones, including ridiculing and teasing ones that are deliberately sharper.

Pick by what you want to feel when you read it, not by what you think the photo deserves. Whether a judge should be blunt or kind is worth reading first if you are unsure.

The meanness dial

A meanness dial appears when you choose one of the ridiculing or teasing tones, and only for those. It sets how much bite the tone carries, so decide it deliberately.

A low setting keeps it playful. A high one turns it into a roast, which reads very differently on a day you are feeling fragile.

The tone travels with the result

The tone a rating was written in is recorded with it. When you open it again from your history, you see the tone alongside the score, summary and observations, which makes it easy to compare two runs.

That is the cleanest way to learn what a tone does: run the same photo through two tones, change nothing else, and compare. Persona ideas for your custom AI judge has combinations of tone, dials and focus areas to start from.

Choosing one

If you want information, choose clinical and put detail high. If you want a laugh, choose a lighter tone and raise humour. If you want a roast, choose a teasing one and think hard about the meanness dial.

If you are not sure, the Custom Persona page lists what is currently offered, and the Sample tab shows the range. Treat the first generation as a trial and change only the tone for the second.

A side-by-side method

To compare tones fairly, hold everything else constant. Use the same photo, the same four dial values and the same focus areas, then change only the tone. Run it for two tones and open both results from your history.

Look at three things: how long each observation runs, how personal the phrasing is, and whether the summary reads like a verdict or like a comment. Those are the places register shows up first.

What tones do not do

A tone does not change what the rating is based on. It is generated from your photo, so lighting and angle limit every tone equally, and a sultry rating of a poor photo is still a rating of a poor photo.

Nor does a tone make a rating more accurate. If you want accuracy, the clinical end plus a high detail dial is the nearest thing to a plain report, and why your AI cock score changed between photos explains why the photo matters more than the voice.

Finally, no tone is a recommendation. The ten are a menu of registers, and the sensible approach is to try the ones you are curious about rather than assume one is best.

Matching tone to purpose

For a record you may want to revisit, use the clinical end, because a plain account ages better than a joke. For something to send a friend, a lighter tone with humour raised reads well, and for a private treat the sultry end is the one built for it.

For feedback you intend to act on, pick the tone you can actually listen to. A rating you find hard to read is one you will not learn from, however accurate it is. That is the same trade-off as blunt or kind for human judges.

Whatever you choose, remember the rating is generated and saved to your history, so you can always try another tone on the same photo later.

Reading the tone in your history

Open the rating history from the clipboard button in the title bar and you will see the tone stored with each result. If you generate several in a session, that label is the quickest way to tell them apart.

It also protects you from misremembering. A rating you found harsh may have been the teasing tone with the meanness dial high, and the record shows it, so you know what to change rather than blaming the photo.

A note on the sample reels

The Sample tab exists so that you can hear the range before you pay for anything. Listen to two or three tones back to back, ignoring the content and paying attention to the register, then pick the one you would be happy to read about yourself.

Do not pick purely on the first one that makes you laugh; humour wears thin on a record you may want to revisit, and the register you choose also shapes how comfortable the observations are to read.