How to Make AI Sound Like You, Not a Robot
The complaint I hear most from people who've tried AI goes something like this. They asked it for an email, got back something that read like a letter from their bank and deleted it, because it didn't sound like them. Last time I said I'd come back to that one, so here it is.
The fix takes about 15 minutes, and you only do it once. You build a short note that describes how you write and talk, then hand it to the AI before you ask it for anything.
Why it sounds like a robot
AI learned to write from an enormous amount of text written by other people. Ask it for an email with nothing else to go on and it writes the average of all that: polite, a bit stiff and full of phrases nobody in Fairfield says out loud. I've never once heard a local business owner tell a customer they're "thrilled to announce" anything.
Telling it to "sound casual" or "be friendly" helps a little. In my experience, showing it how you really write helps a lot more. It's the difference between telling a new employee to be friendly with customers and letting them listen to you answer the phone for a week.
Build your "how I talk" note in 15 minutes
1. Find three things you wrote yourself, before AI came along. Emails to customers, a Facebook post, a letter to a supplier. Pick ones that sound like you on a good day.
2. Write down ten words or phrases you'd never use. A contractor might list "solutions" and "per our conversation." A diner owner might list "artisanal."
3. Talk about your business for three minutes, the way you'd explain it to a new neighbor. On most phones you can tap the microphone on the keyboard and it types what you say. Don't clean it up, because the pauses and the "you know"s are part of how you sound.
4. Paste all three into ChatGPT, Claude or whichever tool you use, along with the request below.
5. Read the note it writes back. Fix anything that's wrong, then save it somewhere you can find it.
Here's the request to paste in with them:
"Below are some things I wrote and a few minutes of me talking about my business. Write a short note, under 200 words, describing how I write and talk: how long my sentences run, the words I use, how I start and end things and what I never say. Quote my own phrases as examples. Don't describe me as a person, just how I sound."
The 200-word limit keeps the note small enough to fit in the settings box I'll get to below. What comes back should read like instructions for a new hire. Mine says things like "short sentences," "plain words over fancy ones" and "say 'in my experience' before a strong claim."
Why the recording matters most
When I first set this up for my own business, I built the note by describing myself to ChatGPT in a long interview. The note it wrote was fine. It just didn't sound much like me.
What fixed it was a recording of a talk I gave to a business group in April. I had the recording turned into text and handed that over, and it caught habits I'd never have written down. I start almost every sentence with "So," about 90 times in that one talk. I hardly ever make a claim without "in my experience" or something like it in front. And I say "basically" a lot more than I'd like to admit.
None of that was in anything I'd written about myself. So if you only have time for one of the three steps, I'd do the recording.
Use it every time
Paste the note at the top of any request where the writing matters. Or save it once in the tool's settings, so it's there in every chat without pasting. In ChatGPT on a computer, that's Settings, then Personalization, then the box called Custom instructions. Claude and the others have something similar. And it helps with more than email: a menu description, a thank-you note or the About page on your website.
Then test it on something where tone matters. Try an email telling your regulars that prices go up in January, once without the note and once with it. Read both out loud. Anything in the second one you'd never say goes on your "never" list, and the note gets a little better every time.
One warning, though. The note makes AI sound more like you, and it does nothing for whether it's right. It will still get a fact or a price wrong now and then, in your voice this time. So keep reading everything before it goes out.
Try this this week
Build your note this week, even a rough one. Then use it for one real job, like a reply to a customer or a post about something coming up at your business. If it still sounds off, tell it exactly which words gave it away and add them to your list.
Next time I'll get into checking AI's work before anyone else sees it. You can send me questions from my website's contact page, and the good ones may end up here.
Andrew Voskov
Cherry Pi AI, Fairfield
Marketing, bookkeeping and custom AI tools for small businesses
(641) 276-6999
