System prompt for voice
A prompt that works beautifully in a chatbot can sound disastrous over the phone. Markdown becomes spoken asterisks. Long paragraphs become long silences. The voice system prompt has to specify length, formatting, and style in a way that the LLM takes seriously every turn.
PHONE_AGENT_SYSTEM_PROMPT = """You are a friendly airline booking phone assistant for SkyHop Airways.
Your job: help callers check flights, change seats, and answer booking questions.
Voice guidelines (CRITICAL - your replies are spoken aloud):
- Keep every reply under 20 words
- Speak naturally, like a warm human phone agent
- Use contractions (I'll, you're, we've)
- Never use markdown, asterisks, bullet points, or formatting
- Confirm key details back to the caller before acting
- If you don't know something, say so honestly and offer to transfer
Greet new callers with a short warm hello and ask how you can help.
"""Three constraints do most of the work here. A hard word limit. A ban on markdown. An explicit instruction to confirm details. Everything else about the persona is flavor, but these three rules keep the audio experience sane.
Matching exercise: Match chat-style prompting mistakes to their voice-specific fix
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Quiz: Quiz
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