<p>After user research and quantitative testing comes the real force multiplier: a <strong>design system</strong> that lets every team spin up on-brand AI characters without reinventing the wheel. Phoebe explains why a system is <strong>more than a style guide</strong> and how it becomes the shared language for voice, visuals, and behavior across markets.</p><p><strong>Highlights</strong></p><p><strong>- Style guide ≠ design system</strong> – how reusable assets, research-backed rules, and governance turn a static brand book into a living toolkit that accelerates creative work instead of policing it.</p><p><strong>- Core building blocks</strong> – voice-tone tokens, expression libraries, “basic pause” timing, fallback-response prompts, error-recovery patterns, earcons, and perception-test templates.</p><li><p><strong>- Begin with the end in mind</strong> – anchoring the system to the company’s mission so every asset (from TTS voice profiles to UX flows) ladders up to the same north star.</p></li><li><p><strong>- Politics & practicality</strong> – picking the right contributors, defusing naming battles, and using data (not opinions) to resolve push-pull between global consistency and local nuance.</p></li><li><p><strong>- Lightweight → enterprise-grade</strong> – why a starter kit of reusable prompts is still a design system, and how it can grow into code packages, speech-data pipelines, and performance benchmarks.</p></li><li><p><strong>- Scalable guidance, not rigid rules</strong> – giving regional teams research frameworks and analysis tools to localize characters while staying unmistakably on-brand.</p><p><br></p></li><p>If you’ve nailed a single AI character and are wondering, “How do we replicate this across products, languages, or markets without chaos?”—this episode shows how to turn hard-won insights into a system that scales creativity rather than stifling it.</p>
