How to Train ChatGPT for Tone of Voice: The Basics

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm in the last year. Since launching at the end of 2022, the generative AI solution has set records for the fastest-growing user base of any tech app. Today, it’s not just everyday people using ChatGPT to answer questions and draft emails. Employees and business leaders around the world are using the tool to enhance and scale content creation.

Convenient and easy to use, ChatGPT can produce everything from social media captions, to email campaigns, blog posts, articles, press releases, and video scripts in seconds. There’s only one problem. By default, the tone of voice used by the app is generic and impersonal.

This means much of the content produced by ChatGPT won’t directly reflect your brand or personality. Fortunately, there are ways you can train ChatGPT to write content in your specific tone of voice. Here’s how to get started.

Training ChatGPT for Your Tone of Voice

Fortunately, for business users and marketers creating content, ChatGPT is a relatively customisable tool. The prompts you give the generative AI app, as well as the “custom instructions” you use can help you to alter the writing style of the bot. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

Step 1: Define Your Tone of Voice and Writing Style

Before you can train ChatGPT to replicate your tone of voice, you need to understand your writing style. Each person and company’s writing style is made up of various distinct elements, such as your:

• Voice: The way your content sounds is based on the words you use. For instance, you might be conversational, informal, professional, or academic. 
• Tone: The attitude conveyed in your writing, such as sarcasm, authority, or playfulness. This can vary based on the type of content you produce.
• Style: The specific choices you make for language and sentence structure. For instance, you might try to convey information in as few words as possible.
• Structure: How you organise everything in your writing, from the word order to the flow of each paragraph you produce.

There are various ways to define your writing style. You can make a list of the things you want to convey in your content, such as authority and experience. You can also feed ChatGPT a copy of one of your pieces, and ask it to analyse your writing style for you.

Step 2: Creating your Training Dataset

Once you have a solid understanding of your unique tone of voice, it’s time to start collecting assets and examples that help ChatGPT to understand that tone. This could include examples of your favourite or highest-performing blog posts and articles, social media posts or emails.

You could also collect examples of content written by other companies that reflect a similar writing style to the one you want to achieve. To make sure you get the best results from your training set, try to include a variety of topics for ChatGPT to explore. Plus, remember to include examples of the types of writing styles you want to avoid. 

As your brand evolves, you may also need to consider updating your dataset with new examples. This will ensure ChatGPT has an up-to-date understanding of the kind of tone you’re trying to create. 

Step 3: Share Training Data with ChatGPT

There are a few different ways you can share training data with ChatGPT to alter the responses it gives to certain prompts and questions. If you have ChatGPT Plus, the premium version of the app, you can create a custom GPT, by clicking on the “Explore” button, and selecting “Create GPT”. Here you can design an entirely new model, and provide it with all the data from your dataset. 

Another option is to use the “Custom Instructions” feature on ChatGPT Plus. This allows you to provide ChatGPT with specific instructions and guidelines it should consider in every conversation you have going forward. 

To use Custom Instructions, log into ChatGPT, click on your name, then select “Features”. Next, select “Custom Instructions”. In the section marked, “How would you like ChatGPT to respond”, provide information about your writing style based on the dataset you’ve gathered. 

You can tell ChatGPT to use a specific voice, tone, style, and structure, and even include links to specific content you like, or copy content into the system.

Users can also provide ChatGPT with additional content, in the section marked, “What would you like ChatGPT to know about you”. Here, you can tell ChatGPT all about your business model, or your writing preferences, to give it more scope when creating responses.

Step 4: Experimenting with the App

Once you’ve introduced Custom Instructions to ChatGPT, or created your own GPT app, the next step is to see how effectively that information is influencing the bot’s responses. Load up ChatGPT and start entering prompts like you would normally. 

Even if you’re using custom instructions, it’s worth providing as much context as possible in your prompts to help improve the quality of the response. Remind ChatGPT of the tone or style you want it to use, and provide examples wherever possible. You can even tell ChatGPT Plus to replicate the style present on a website page for a particular blog or article. 

If you’re happy with the response you get from a specific prompt, you can also ask ChatGPT to create a style blueprint or future prompt blueprint you can use to create similar responses. For instance, you might say, “ChatGPT, will you please describe the writing style developed here step-by-step as if you were creating instructions for another AI app.” 

Step 5: Remember to Refine and Edit

Notably, while you can train ChatGPT to replicate your tone of voice and writing style, it’s still just a generative AI bot. It won’t necessarily write every piece of content exactly like you would. There’s always a chance the bot will still deliver content that doesn’t match your tone, or provide insights that aren’t completely accurate. 

Review each response from the bot as you experiment with the app, and provide ChatGPT with continuous feedback. Remember, creating content with ChatGPT is an iterative process. You can always ask the bot to recreate a response with a friendlier tone of voice or make a piece of content more concise and professional. 

Each feedback loop you engage in with the bot improves the system’s understanding of what you need. The more you iterate and fine-tune the response, the more likely it is you’ll end up with the perfect results. 

Can ChatGPT Truly Match Your Tone of Voice?

ChatGPT is a fantastic tool, excellent for enhancing and scaling content creation, but it has its limitations. While the bot can emulate your tone of voice and writing style, it needs significant guidance and feedback to do so. You’ll need to commit to creating in-depth instructions and prompts that guide ChatGPT towards the right responses. 

Once you’ve found a strategy that works for you, you can always ask ChatGPT for help creating instructions, prompts, and briefs you can use in the future. 

Additionally, it will always be important to carefully evaluate the output of ChatGPT whenever you’re using it to create content. Don’t be afraid to input elements of your personality when necessary, and make changes to the content produced.