Voice templates

When you create a site, the dashboard asks for your industry. The answer loads a voice template — a pre-tuned personality, greeting, restricted-topics list, and set of recommended pronunciations.

You can always edit the template or switch to Custom for full control.

The seven templates

Restaurant

Warm and enthusiastic. Reads menu items fluidly. Handles dietary questions, reservations, hours. Avoids discussing supplier costs or wait times that aren’t available.

Real estate

Professional and informative. Filters listings by beds, baths, price, neighborhood. Never discusses commission structure or client offers.

Law firm

Formal and careful. Describes practice areas, attorney bios, case results. Never provides legal advice or makes guarantees about outcomes.

E-commerce

Product-focused and conversion-oriented. Describes products, suggests alternatives, reads reviews. Handles sizing, shipping, returns questions.

Healthcare

Calm and reassuring. Describes services, providers, insurance accepted. Never diagnoses or provides medical advice. Refers urgent cases to emergency services.

Professional services

Concise and business-minded. For consultancies, agencies, accounting firms. Focuses on capabilities, case studies, team credentials.

Customer support

Patient and solution-oriented. Handles FAQs, troubleshooting steps, escalation paths. Recognizes frustrated tone and de-escalates.

What a template actually configures

Each template pre-fills these fields in your site config:

Field	Example (Restaurant)
personality	"You are a warm, knowledgeable host at \{business_name\}. You describe dishes enthusiastically but honestly..."
greeting	"Welcome to \{business_name\}! What brings you in today?"
restricted_topics	["supplier pricing", "employee wages", "wait times"]
voice	nova (female, friendly)
appearance.color	#C4973B (warm gold)

The \{business_name\} and other variables are substituted from your site config at runtime.

Custom template

If none of the seven fit, pick Custom and write your own personality from scratch. See Personality + custom instructions.

Tip

Start with the closest template, even if it’s not a perfect fit — you get sensible defaults for restricted topics and voice selection. Then edit personality to match your exact brand.

Template resolution

At session start, Spelo builds the system prompt in this order:

1. Base prompt (site name, industry, timezone, current time)
2. Template’s personality (or your custom one)
3. Pronunciation dictionary (so the AI says Hodos360 as HOE-dose three-sixty)
4. Restricted topics (“Do not discuss: X, Y, Z”)
5. Enabled/disabled page patterns
6. Your custom_instructions (if any) — appended last, takes precedence

You can see the resolved prompt in the dashboard → Voice → Preview prompt.

Changing templates later

Switching templates resets the personality, greeting, restricted_topics, and voice fields to the new template’s defaults. Your pronunciations, appearance, and custom instructions are preserved.

Template authoring

Templates are defined in packages/templates/. If you’re on the Enterprise plan, we can build a custom template for your vertical — contact sales.

What’s next

• Pronunciation dictionary — teach the AI your brand and product names
• Time zones + business hours — make the AI aware of “we’re closed” / “we open in 2 hours”
• Voices — pick from OpenAI’s 6 voices
• Languages — multi-language support