What’s in a name?

What to consider when naming your VIP (Virtual Interactive Personality)

A blog from James Scott, CXO at Rapport

To Name, or Not to Name? 

The question of whether or not a virtual being should even have a name comes up more frequently than I expected it might. After all, the primary purpose of Rapport is to help enable meaningful 1-1 connections at scale. How you refer to someone, or something, affects how you relate to them. There are few scenarios I can think of where it would be normal for someone not to introduce themselves by name, be wearing a name badge, or at least be willing to tell you who they are if you were to ask them. 

It’s in my nature to anthropomorphisize things. I believe that most animals are just people with slightly different hygiene standards. Meanwhile, there are some people that attribute names and human characteristics to objects, like cars. “I wonder if old Bessie will make it up the M1 this weekend?”

For readers outside of the UK, the M1 is a highway that stretches from London in the South East up into the far North of the country. And Bessie is the sort of name someone might give affectionately to a faithful-but-falling-apart VW Beetle. Probably in a rusted purple. 

The very purpose of this is to establish and nurture connection and relatability. It’s a source of comfort and joy. And in the kinds of scenarios where Rapport is commonly used, these qualities can improve the efficacy of learning and business outcomes. In fact, emotional connection is a powerful factor in optimising any type of engagement. Which I suppose seems painfully obvious when I put it like that. 

In any case, I believe names are important for VIPs. Not only can it accelerate the connection you want your audience to feel with the Virtual Interactive Personality you create, but it can help you shape the character more effectively; informing the decisions you make about their voice and appearance. It’s no different really than creating personae for the initial stages of experience design. Only in this case, you’re not defining the end user, but the persona they will engage with. 

Of course, there are cases where the VIP is in fact an avatar of someone who is or was a living, breathing human. In this case, it’s fairly standard to augment the original name with something to distinguish the digital double from the real deal. At the time of writing, we’re working on the digital twin of our CEO, Gregor Hofer. And because he is a real person, we haven’t yet put much thought into what his virtual counterpart will be referred to as officially. So far, it’s Digital Gregor, Virtual Gregor, GregorBot, Gr3g0r, Gregor2, Gregor 2-D2, C-EPO. OK, some of those I just made up, but it’s a fun process. And there are many other undesirable options out there to employ various technotropes, such as Cyber, Robo and Synth. 

This article, however, is about what to name VIPs that are not meant to represent a specific human. 

Happy Accidents

I tend to work intuitively first, and then do some research to validate or invalidate the direction I’m heading in. I think this is due to the way the BTEC Performing Arts programme I was on at college was structured. Whereas the A-Level students would, for example, read about a playwright and then stage one of their plays, we did it the other way around. Our tutors would provide us with concepts and looser stimulus for us to produce something original, and then explain how what we’d done related to the playwright.

When I put together the Dream Doctor demo, the objective was to show how quickly an end-to-end experience could be created. So I went with the first name that came into my head: Madame Alara. It just felt right. But it wasn’t until AFTER the demo was published that I thought I should look up the meaning of the name Alara, just in case it was somehow inappropriate. Much to my delight, the name Alara is that of “a beautiful water fairy in Turkish mythology, who has the power to grant wishes and mend broken hearts”. So even though Madame Alara is not a water fairy (and neither, I’m almost sure, were any of the c.937,000 babies born in 2021 that were also awarded the name), the fact that I prompt engineered her to give advice in relation to the dreams she would decode, places her in the realm of someone who can help people heal.

What surprised me about Madame Alara’s responses, was that they were consistently kind and comforting. I’m glad that’s the case, but I didn’t make that a parameter of her remit. Part of me believes the underlying ChatGPT-4o model used may have some guard-rails in place to keep things positive, but I also wonder if citing the name Alara in my prompt had some impact on determining the demeanor of the character.

Meaningful Trends

When I first thought it might be interesting to explore the role of names in shaping VIP (Virtual Interactive Personality) experiences, I was coming at it from the point of how it would affect the human participant’s perception. There’s a heuristic component to this - e.g. Does the name suit the appearance of the character? Is the name pleasing to the ear and rewarding to say? - and the more implicit suitability of the name to the function of the character. What we tend to see from our competitors, is a lot of variations on Sophia (Sofia, Sophie, Sofi, etc.), which generally means ‘wisdom’. The inherent trend here is that AI-driven characters have access to vast amounts of information and should be able to give consistently accurate answers to your questions. But as we know, AI hallucinations can rather undermine the character’s position as an all-knowing genius.

Sometimes the dots are a little harder to join. Taking a step back to pre-GPT era voice assistants, Alexa means ‘defender of man’, and Siri means ‘beautiful woman who leads you to victory’. This surprised me, since I was expecting the former to be something like ‘spy who listens to your every word to feed advertising algorithms, but a very useful calculator’ and the latter to be ‘inconsistent speech recognition and generally useless when needed most”. Apparently, Amazon was also inspired by the name of a computer in Star Trek called Alexa. It’s probably no surprise that Google Bard is named after The Bard of Avon - William Shakespeare - in reference to its linguistic capabilities. 

I digress. 

Baby baby

The principles for naming your VIP are not dissimilar to the principles I’d recommend when crafting any kind of experience. For starters, know your audience. Do you need to create someone who represents them and is reflective of their age group? Should the name play to their cultural reference points? (On that, I’m genuinely surprised to learn that the name Taylor is a less popular baby name now than it was in the 90s, in both the US and the UK.) Or is the necessary relationship dynamic such that the VIP should take on a more authoritative role? Put simply, use the right tools for the job. 

AAAP (Acronyms Are Also Popular) 

One of our partners, Relativ.ai, calls their VIP ARIA (Agent for Real-time Interaction and Analysis). I like it because its literal meaning from the original Italian is ‘air’, while in music it also denotes an emotionally attuned song or melody. I often think of Rapport as the music between the notes; the connective tissue between the AI, TTS, ASR and animated character components, that serves to deliver something greater than the sum of those parts. 

Oftentimes though, acronyms can be a bit “cringe”. I remember going to work for one firm (which will remain nameless!) that wanted to sell a piece of software called SWAN. I asked them why the product had been named as such, and they admitted they couldn’t think of anything, so they went with ‘System Without A Name’. Yikes. 

Summary: How to choose the perfect name

Hopefully, the acronym I’m about to invent to help you consider the best name for your VIP is useful, and not too cringe. FORM stands for Familiarity, Originality, Relevance and Musicality. The challenge is to balance each of these components against each other. 

Familiarity

Something comfortable, that your audience will warm to. Why not ask them what kinds of names they like? 

Originality 

Whatever you do, don’t call your VIP Sophia, or a variant thereof. Work out how you can differentiate. 

Relevance

While Sophia is an overused name for chatbots, its prevalence is a symptom of its underlying meaning of ‘wisdom’. Be more specific when naming your VIP. They may be wise, but what are they especially wise about? 

Musicality 

Is the name easy on the ear? Is it pleasant to say? This is more about the physical experience of hearing or using the name. If it’s an ugly sound for your audience, or difficult to pronounce or say, it probably won’t be effective. 

Adopt-a-VIP

If you’re not convinced that the name of your VIP is that important, or simply don’t have the time or space to go through a structured process to determine the optimal monicker, you can stick with the names we’ve given the characters we include for you to use freely on the Rapport platform. 

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