mimic.me – Performing prompt engineering on GPT-3/ChatGPT to provide answers based on a verbal personality.

Everybody has verbal nuances. Things they say that make people go “that’s so something ____ would say!”. These verbal personality traits are incredibly unique to each individual; entirely based on their own experiences and exposures throughout life.

It’s the subtle things we say or inflect that make us instantly recognisable to those who have spent a certain amount of time around us, and less so to those to whom we’ve just met. You can probably see where I am going with this. With enough exposure to not just what we say (GPT-3), or how we sound (ElevenLabs), but to inflections and small nuances we say in situations given specific context, we could replicate a person’s verbal personality with even today’s Large Language Models.

Why would we want to do this? For a number of reasons, and a number of very human applications. We could reinact love ones to help cope with sudden loss. We could bring back great minds from the past and hear them, in their own voice rather than just words on a screen, teach and read their own literature. We could immortalise ourselves for our decendents to interact with, and see what we were like.

Conversely, we could pretend to be in several places at once. People could speak to who they thought was us, but was instead a verbal clone. How could one experience things and live a thought out, meaningful life an AI lived it for them? Performing verbal mimicry is yet another question of could vs should; a theme which will no doubt dominate the conversations surrounding these technologies in coming years.

It’s an exciting time to be alive. We are at the precipice of a truly human evolution. In order to regulate what we should allow these technologies to be capable of, we will need to define and therefore, potentially the first time to this scale, truly consider what it is to be human. Because any technology capable of aiding or replacing a human activity is detracting from or removing a human from having the experience of engaging in that activity.

So it must then be asked – what experiences do we want technologies to take away from us? Being exposed to things through experience is not just how we as humans are built to learn, but it’s what thrillseekers and philosphers would argue makes us unique.

I write this in the midst of building my next project, hatem.ai, to automate and accelerate the sales cold calling experience. Over 95% of all cold sales calls end in a follow up meeting; beginning what is colloquially known as the “sales cycle” which often takes months. The conversion rate is incredibly low, so the more interactions that are made by a salesperson, the better it is for both them and the company. Instead of 10 calls a day to scope potential leads, why could we not make 10,000? Impossible for a single person. Instantaneous for hatem.ai.

However, it’s success entirely hinges on the program’s ability to mimic the salesperson’s personality. To make the interaction seem human to the other party. To correctly detect small details in the conversation to build upon during the follow up lunch. Hence, this spin-off idea and subsequent side project – mimic.me.

To create and correctly replicate verbal interaction with someone, some of the many questions I want to ask is:

• Can we accurately replicate verbal nuances? (“I say “oh dude” far more than I either realise or care to admit.”)
• Can we detect inflection in the other person’s speech on certain topics, to dictate what they may have been excited or upset about for a future conversation?
• Can we leverage Fourier-trained Language models to perform verbal sentiment analysis, and respond with the same tone and wording we would use in those scenarios? (We all act and sound different in friendly vs serious vs introductory conversations. Some even have what they would call a “retail voice” for the latter.)
  
  For hatem.ai to truly be good, I would need to build mimic.me. And these questions would have to be answered. I have many feature ideas in the works for both – but I also must ensure they are developed with care. I am not replacing someone’s job, but a number of experiences that make up that job. The nervousness of cold calling. Learning the sales challenge of turning customer hesitancy into an eagerness to learn more. To form human connections. They impact who we are and what makes that person in the future.
  
  I greatly look forward to the experiences these projects will bring.