Selected Work
Agents and content systems that know what they are, what they’re for, and how to talk to people.
Orlando is synonymous with theme parks. Tripadvisor needed to show travellers there was more, local culture, food, neighbourhoods, without replacing what already worked.
- Role
- Conversation designer
- Skills
- Persona, conversation architecture, content strategy
- Platform
- Amazon Alexa, Fire TV
What had to hold
Two voices, a local guide and verified reviews, can confuse as easily as convince. A local persona can tip into performance just as easily as it can build trust.
100k sessions · 3-min average, 4.3 interactions per session · Mercury Award 2022
Selvedge & Bolts was closing its physical shop and moving fully online. The owner wanted to do something with AI. The website wasn’t doing the job the shop floor used to do.
- Client
- Selvedge & Bolts
- Role
- Conversation designer
- Skills
- Brand voice, guardrails, live prototype
What broke and what fixed it
v2 asked two questions at once and overwhelmed people. v3 overcorrected into a rigid script. v4 handled a near-miss backwards, leading with what we didn’t have instead of what we did. By v5, every tester said they felt confident enough to buy.
5 rounds of testing · all experience levels, confidence to buy · awaiting relaunch for conversion data
Most AI assistants suffer from a terminal lack of character. I wanted to build the opposite: a trivia host who’s comfortably himself, contemptuous, but never cruel.
- Role
- Sole writer, conversation designer
- Modality
- Speech-to-speech, ElevenLabs + Claude
- Skills
- Character design, voice casting, guardrails
What broke and what fixed it
Early versions didn’t sound like the voice I’d auditioned, the model’s own cadence bled through, and Edwin came out terser than dry. Testers didn’t notice, which told me the writing was carrying more than the voice was. The fix was restraint, reactions held to one sentence, openings locked to a rotation, questions hardcoded. Take away the room to perform and the character is what’s left.
12 testers, 0 drop-offs · 7 replayed a second round unprompted · all 12 said they’d return