Glossary
Tone
The emotional register and relational quality of a model's responses — whether it comes across as warm, formal, playful, cautious, authoritative, and so on.
Tone is the way a model “sounds” to a user — independent of the factual content of its response. A model can give the same information in a warm and encouraging tone, a clinical and detached tone, or a casual and conversational tone. Tone shapes user experience enormously: a customer service bot that sounds cold and bureaucratic, or a creative writing tool that sounds overly cautious and formal, can undermine the product even if the underlying information is accurate. Defining and maintaining the right tone across diverse contexts — assertive when helping but empathetic when someone is struggling, concise in quick tasks but thorough in complex ones — is a central behavior design challenge.