When we talk about AI products, we often focus on what the technology can do. How intelligent is it? How accurate is it? How quickly can it respond? How much work can it automate?
But as AI becomes a more common interface between companies and their customers, I think we need to ask another question: what is it like to interact with the AI?
I am Amara Awana, a Conversational AI Designer. I design and build AI conversational systems. My work sits at the intersection of conversation design, AI product experience, branding and marketing. My background in English and Literary Studies, alongside my interests in scriptwriting, filmmaking and brand strategy, has shaped the way I think about conversations between people and machines.
Designing AI conversational systems is a branding and marketing decision not only a technical decision, not only a product decision, not only a UX decision.
Because when an AI becomes one of the ways people experience a company, the way that AI communicates becomes part of the experience. And the experience becomes part of the brand. That is where I think conversational AI gets particularly interesting.
I Think About AI Through Character
My interest in this started with storytelling. Think about a character in a film that you really love. You probably remember more than what happened in the story you remember the character: their personality, their mannerisms, their reactions and, especially, the way they speak. Sometimes you can recognise a character from a single line because you already know how that character talks. There is an identity there, and that identity makes the character both recognisable and memorable.
I started wondering what this could mean for AI. What happens when we deliberately design an AI conversational system with a recognisable identity? Not because we are pretending the AI is human, but because we have made intentional decisions about how it communicates: its voice, its tone, its personality, its conversational behaviour, its responses to different situations, its relationship with the user.
Imagine two AI products that can perform essentially the same task. Both are accurate, useful and fast. But one feels generic, while the other has a distinctive conversational identity that fits the product. You may use both, but you might remember one. You might even talk about it: “I love this AI.”
That interests me, because now the user is not remembering only what the product did they are remembering the experience of interacting with it. And that experience can become part of the brand.
The Conversation Is Part of the Brand
We often think about branding through visual elements: the logo, the colours, the typography, the website, the packaging, the social media presence. But people do not experience brands only through visual identity. They experience them through interactions.
If an AI is one of the ways a customer interacts with a company, then that conversation is part of the brand experience. Think about what happens when a customer asks an AI a question. The system has an opportunity to communicate something about the company through that interaction. It can feel warm or cold, playful or serious, formal or conversational, direct or overly cautious, distinctive or completely interchangeable. Those choices affect the interaction, and the interaction contributes to how the user experiences the product.
This is why I keep coming back to a simple idea: everything is brand. The conversation is part of the experience. The experience is part of how people perceive the product. And the personality of the AI can become part of what people remember about the product. That makes conversational design more than an interface decision it becomes a brand decision.
Duolingo Shows What This Can Look Like
One company that has understood the power of personality particularly well is Duolingo. Duolingo is not simply a language learning product with a green owl attached to it. The personality of Duo, the company’s mascot, has become deeply connected to the way people experience the brand: the humour, the exaggerated reactions, the playful threats, the tone of its notifications, the way the brand communicates on social media. These are not separate from the product’s identity they reinforce it.
Imagine extending that principle beyond a mascot or marketing campaign and into an AI interaction. If a user is talking to an AI tutor, the AI does not have to communicate like a generic educational chatbot. It could reflect the same personality principles that make the wider product recognisable. That does not mean every response needs to contain a joke, or that the AI should constantly perform a character. It means the interaction can have an intentional point of view: encouraging without sounding artificial, playful without becoming distracting, direct without becoming cold, supportive when the user struggles, celebratory when they make progress.
The important thing is consistency. The personality should feel like it belongs to the product. That is where branding and conversational design begin to overlap.
This Is Where Marketing Comes In
I think conversational AI can become one of the most interesting marketing touchpoints for an AI product. Not because the AI should constantly sell something that is not what I mean. I mean that every interaction is an opportunity to reinforce what the product represents.
If a company says its brand is friendly, but its AI communicates like a cold instruction manual, there is a disconnect. If a product is built around creativity, but every interaction feels robotic and generic, there is another disconnect. If a company has spent years developing a distinctive brand voice, but its AI sounds exactly like every other AI product, that is an opportunity being missed.
The AI is communicating with the customer. So why should that communication feel disconnected from the brand? For me, that is a marketing question. And it is a design question.
The interaction itself can carry the brand in the way a system welcomes someone, asks a question, or handles frustration.
The interesting part is that this does not require the AI to advertise anything. The interaction itself can carry the brand: the way the system welcomes someone, the way it asks questions, the way it explains something, the way it handles frustration, the way it responds when it does not know something, the way it guides someone through a task. All of these are moments in which the user is experiencing the product. That is why I think conversational design deserves a place in the marketing conversation.
Designing Personality Is Not Just Making AI Fun
There is a tendency to think that giving an AI personality means making it quirky: give it a funny name, add jokes, make it use emojis, give it an avatar. That is not what I mean by personality.
Personality needs to be designed intentionally. How does this AI speak? How direct is it? What does it value? How does it respond when the user is frustrated? How does it handle uncertainty? What does it do when it cannot fulfil a request? How does it disagree? How does it guide the user? What kinds of language does it repeatedly use? What should the interaction feel like? These are conversational design decisions, and they can influence the identity of the product.
A memorable AI does not necessarily have to be loud or entertaining. It can be quiet. It can be serious. It can be extremely direct. It can be warm. It can be sophisticated. The point is not to make every AI quirky the point is to make the AI recognisable, appropriate and intentional. Its personality should make sense for what the product is and the experience the company wants people to have.
Conversation Is More Than Generating a Response
This is another reason my background influences how I approach conversational AI. I studied English and Literary Studies, which gave me an interest in language, pragmatics, discourse and turn taking. I also write, work with scripts and have an interest in filmmaking. So when I look at a conversation between a person and an AI, I naturally think beyond the individual response.
I think about the interaction. What happens before the response? What does the user expect? What should happen next? When should the system ask a question? When should it stop talking? How should it recover when something goes wrong? How should one turn influence the next? How does the conversation feel as a whole?
In scriptwriting, dialogue is not simply a collection of sentences. Dialogue moves something forward. It reveals character. It communicates information. It creates tension. It establishes relationships. It changes the direction of a scene. I think there is something valuable in bringing that way of thinking into conversational AI design.
We are designing conversations. So we should care about how those conversations work. An AI response should not only be evaluated by whether it is correct. We should also ask whether it is appropriate for the moment, whether it moves the interaction forward and whether it contributes to a coherent experience.
What Makes an AI Product Feel Like Its Own?
This becomes increasingly important as AI products become more common. Many products will have access to powerful underlying models. Many will be able to answer questions, summarise, generate, recommend and automate. The technology behind them may become increasingly accessible. So I think another question becomes important: what makes your AI experience yours?
Part of the answer may be the technology. But part of it can also be the experience built around the technology: the personality, the conversational behaviour, the voice, the way the system interacts with people, the way it handles uncertainty, the way it responds to different situations, the way it represents the brand.
This is where I see conversational AI design becoming strategically important. The underlying model may not be what differentiates one product from another the experience built around that model might. Two companies could use similar AI models and still create completely different products, because the model is only one part of the experience. What happens around it matters too. The conversation matters. The interaction matters. The personality matters. The brand matters.
What I Am Interested in Designing
This is the space I am exploring through my work. I design and build AI conversational systems. I am interested in how we can design systems that understand their purpose, communicate intentionally and create experiences that people enjoy and remember.
I am interested in the relationship between conversation and product experience, between personality and brand, between dialogue and user experience, between AI systems and the people who interact with them. I am particularly interested in what happens when we stop thinking about conversational AI as simply a way for users to get answers and start thinking about it as a designed experience.
Because sometimes, the most memorable thing about a product may not be what the product did. It may be the experience of interacting with it. The way it spoke. The way it responded. The personality it consistently presented. The small details that made the interaction feel different from another product.
And that is why I believe conversational AI design deserves a place in conversations about product, branding and marketing. The future of AI products will not only be about what their systems can do. It will also be about how those systems communicate, how those interactions shape the product experience and what people remember after the interaction ends.
Not AI that simply works. AI that creates an experience worth remembering.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amara Awana is a Conversational AI Designer who designs and builds AI conversational systems.
Her work sits at the intersection of conversation design, interaction design, AI product experience, branding and marketing. With a background in English and Literary Studies and interests spanning scriptwriting, filmmaking and brand strategy, she approaches conversational AI through the lens of language, dialogue, interaction and experience.
She is interested in designing AI systems that do more than provide information systems that communicate with intention, express a distinctive identity and create experiences people can remember.
Based in Africa and working at the intersection of AI, interaction design, marketing and branding, Amara is exploring what comes next for conversational interfaces, including embodied AI and conversational robotics. Her broader ambition is to help shape how people experience AI, not simply through what these systems can do, but through how they communicate, behave and interact with us.
