Personas: Design Complex AI Characters for Role-Play

An entrepreneurial student faces an impatient venture capitalist. A nursing trainee delivers bad news to an unsuspecting patient. Across campus, a management student fires her friendly but underperforming colleague.

Moments like these are notoriously hard to teach in a classroom. You can discuss empathy or confidence in theory, but you can’t recreate the tension of a real conversation — until now.

Ovation’s Personas feature enables instructors to precisely engineer avatar personalities through customizable AI prompts. Students then directly interact with these dynamic Personas, rehearsing challenging dialogues, sharpening their skills, and building the confidence to communicate effectively when it matters most.

“For educators, this means students can practice for the unpredictability of human interaction, an interpersonal skill that’s impossible to teach in textbooks.” — Jeff Marshall, Ovation Founder/CEO

How Personas Work

1. Choose or Create Personas
   Start by browsing Ovation’s Persona library. You’ll meet quiet listeners, outspoken challengers, straight-faced professionals, and natural comedians. Each comes preloaded with traits that affect their conversation style.
   💡 Create your own: You can specify name, age, and sex, then add a prompt that defines how they’ll behave.
2. Assign Personas to the Scenario
   Instructors or students can decide who is ‘in the room’ for the session. A professor might assign three panelists from different departments to simulate a thesis defense. Or a business student might fill a room with competing investors for pitch practice. Educators can even choose where each Persona sits.

3. Run the Session
   As you speak, Ovation’s AI interprets your words and cues, shaping each Persona’s real-time reaction. One might validate you while another vehemently disagrees. Their collective energy changes how the moment feels, transforming VR from a static simulation into a responsive, human-like exchange.
4. Get Personalized Feedback
   After the session, Ovation’s AI analyzes your effectiveness. Did you maintain confidence when the skeptic challenged your idea? Did you adjust your approach when the listener became disengaged? The feedback draws attention to those adaptive skills and more.

Teaching with AI Role-Playing Based on Real Situations

For educators, the creative potential of using Personas to role-play relevant scenarios is enormous. Here are a few examples of how instructors are already using Personas in class:

Entrepreneurship courses are creating mock investor panels. Students learn to adapt based on who’s asking the questions.

Funeral service degree programs practice difficult financial conversations with family members of the deceased.

Career development offices conduct mock interviews with diverse Personas, ranging from demanding to friendly interviewers.

Management courses simulate firing someone in the workplace to teach valuable HR skills.

By simulating variety and unpredictability, Ovation transforms communication training into an active problem-solving exercise, rather than merely memorization. Students aren’t learning what to say; they’re learning how to think critically and react in the moment.

The Value of Immersive Learning with Personas

Personas go beyond entertainment value by creating measurable learning outcomes, such as:

1. Building Emotional Intelligence: Students improve their awareness of interpersonal dynamics.

2. Strengthening Adaptability: Learners must adjust their delivery, mirroring real-world flexibility that’s essential in interviews, sales, leadership, and beyond.

3. Encouraging Perspective-Taking: Students develop empathy and the ability to communicate across diverse audiences.

4. Supporting Instructor Creativity: Educators can design Persona-based assignments that align with course objectives.

Templates for Building Your Own Personas

Creating your own Personas in Ovation takes less than a minute, but the creative potential is endless. You can make them as realistic or imaginative as you want.

Each Persona includes four key fields:

• Name
• Age
• Sex
• Bio/Personality (up to 500 characters)

Here are a few ready-made templates to inspire your own:

1. The Reluctant Investor

• Name: Jordan Feldman
• Age: 47
• Sex: Male
• Bio/Personality: Analytical and skeptical. Prefers hard data over emotion. Quick to interrupt if claims lack evidence, but impressed by clear ROI.

2. The Encouraging Professor

• Name: Dr. Leena Patel
• Age: 58
• Sex: Female
• Bio/Personality: Warm, thoughtful, and supportive. Nods often and asks probing questions. Offers praise for clarity and creative reasoning.

3. The Overconfident Peer

• Name: Taylor Nguyen
• Age: 22
• Sex: Unspecified
• Bio/Personality: Outspoken and competitive. Jumps in to share opinions, occasionally dismissive. Challenges others to justify their ideas.

4. The Curious Journalist

• Name: Amira López
• Age: 34
• Sex: Female
• Bio/Personality: Inquisitive and observant. Asks follow-up questions that test depth of knowledge. Responds positively to authenticity.

A New Kind of Practice Partner

For years, Ovation has helped learners build confidence through repetition, feedback, and analytics. But with Personas, communication practice takes a leap from structured to spontaneous. Students are now conversing with AI-powered characters who listen, react, and challenge them.

The future of communication training is about mastering unpredictable interactions through repeated simulations, and Ovation's Personas are the key.

Ready to see how Personas can transform your students’ communication skills?

Log in to Ovation and create your first Persona in minutes.