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Personas are the ‘character’ or ‘AI agent personality’ and contain all of the settings and configuration for that character or agent. For example, you can create a persona for ‘Tim the sales agent’ or ‘Rob the interviewer’. Personas combine identity, contextual knowledge, and CVI pipeline configuration to create a real-time conversational agent with a distinct behavior, voice, and response style..

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Persona Customization Options

Each persona includes configurable fields. Here’s what you can customize:
  • Persona Name: Display name shown when the replica joins a call.
  • System Prompt: Instructions sent to the language model to shape the replica’s tone, personality, and behavior.
  • Pipeline Mode: Controls which CVI pipeline layers are active and how input/output flows through the system.
  • Default Replica: Sets the digital human associated with the persona.
  • Layers: Each layer in the pipeline processes a different part of the conversation. Layers can be configured individually to tailor input/output behavior to your application needs.
  • Documents: A set of documents that the persona has access to via Retrieval Augmented Generation.
  • Objectives: The goal-oriented instructions your persona will adhere to throughout the conversation.
  • Guardrails: Conversational boundaries that can be used to strictly enforce desired behavior.

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Objectives & Guardrails

Provide your persona with robust workflow management tools, curated to your use case

Objectives

The sequence of goals your persona will work to achieve to throughout the conversation - for example gathering a piece of information from the user.

Guardrails

Conversational boundaries that can be used to strictly enforce desired behavior.

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Layer

Explore our in-depth guides to customize each layer to fit your specific use case:

Perception Layer

Defines how the persona interprets visual input like facial expressions and gestures.

STT Layer

Transcribes user speech into text using the configured speech-to-text engine.

Conversational Flow Layer

Controls turn-taking, interruption handling, and active listening behavior for natural conversations.

LLM Layer

Generates persona responses using a language model. Supports Tavus-hosted or custom LLMs.

TTS Layer

Converts text responses into speech using Tavus or supported third-party TTS engines.

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Pipeline Mode

Tavus provides several pipeline modes, each with preconfigured layers tailored to specific use cases:
The default and recommended end-to-end configuration optimized for real-time conversation. All CVI layers are active and customizable.
  • Lowest latency
  • Best for natural humanlike interactions
We offer a selection of optimized LLMs including Llama 3.3 and OpenAI models that are fully optimized for the full pipeline mode.

CVI quickstart

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Custom LLM / Bring Your Own Logic

Use this mode to integrate a custom LLM or a specialized backend for interpreting transcripts and generating responses.
  • Adds latency due to external processing
  • Does not require an actual LLM—any endpoint that returns a compatible chat completion format can be used

Integrate your own custom LLM or logic