Building Your Own Custom Roleplays with Open Conversation
Customisation guide
This handy guide provides instructions, examples, and tips that help you lay a solid foundation for your custom roleplay scenarios.
Good direction draws the best performance out of AI, and we’re here to share our tried and true techniques with you. Use this guidance to create a unique and immersive experience for your learners, one that’s tailored to your assessment criteria and will lead to positive behaviour change.
Contents
This guide covers how to effectively fill the customisation fields on BSGO:
1. Title
2. Roleplay description
3. Conversation topic
4. Learner role
5. AI role and backstory
6. AI communication style
7. Assessment criteria
8. Learner instructions
Use the links above to jump to a specific section of this guide.
Title
The title of your custom roleplay is displayed in BSGO for you and in the app for the learner. You have 70 characters to work with (roughly 15 words), so keep it snappy yet identifiable. You can even try to engage the curiosity of your learners with it!
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
Pitch perfect: sell your EdTech product to Curriculum Lead Cassandra
Bargain for more: negotiate a promotion with your manager Mabel
Be a team player: collaborate on a culinary task with classmate Kenji
Roleplay description
This is the roleplay description that learners will see in the app.
Give a short overview of what the roleplay is for, rather than what the learner needs to do (guidance for them goes in the ‘Instructions for the learner’ section). Tailor it to reflect your customised scenario: the situation they’re facing and the skills or behaviours being tested.
You have 280 characters to work with (roughly 50 words).
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
In this AI-powered simulator, you’re going to practice delivering a sales pitch to a virtual avatar. At the end of the conversation, personalised AI-generated feedback will help you hone your pitching approach. Ready to roleplay?
In this AI-powered simulator, you’re going to practice negotiating for a promotion with a virtual avatar. At the end of the conversation, personalised AI-generated feedback will help you improve your negotiation tactics. Ready to roleplay?
In this AI-powered simulator, you’re going to practice collaborating on a group project with a virtual avatar. At the end of the conversation, personalised AI-generated feedback will help you become a better collaborator. Ready to roleplay?
Conversation topic
The information you put in this field is sent to the AI to guide the conversation flow. Be sure to address it to the AI.
The AI character will lead and stay the course of the conversation based on your chosen topic, and they’ll bring the learner back to the topic if they stray off track. It also helps with tailoring the AI-generated feedback to the relevant context.
Use this field to set the scene and describe what topic or situation you want the conversation to focus on. Think of a suitable scenario that will really challenge the learner’s skills or behaviours from your assessment criteria.
You can create all sorts of scenarios! It could be conflict resolution, negotiating a salary increase, giving a sales pitch, providing support to a colleague, engaging in a constructive feedback session – anything you choose.
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
The learner is trying to give a sales pitch and persuade you to integrate some soft skills training courses into your curriculum.
The learner is trying to negotiate for a promotion and increased responsibilities in their UX design role.
You and the learner are collaborating on a group project for your food technology class. The project requires you to both come up with a small dinner menu for a modestly-priced, all-vegetarian pub, The Grub Hub. It needs a starter, a main, and a dessert.
Learner role
Write a short description addressed to the AI about what role the learner will adopt during this simulation. Who are they and what’s their goal in the conversation?
Note: this information is not displayed to the learner. It tells the AI who it’s talking to, helping it engage more realistically with the learner during the conversation and in the feedback. (Your ‘Instructions to the learner’ section will inform the learner who they’re roleplaying.)
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
A salesperson for an EdTech company, MindSwitch, who is trying to sell you virtual reality soft skills training to integrate into your school’s Key Stage 5 curriculum.
A UX designer for an outdoor sports retailer, Horizon Reach. They’ve been in their role for two years now and report directly to you. They want to negotiate for a promotion.
A sixth form student and your classmate at Shireford Academy. You’re working together with them on a creative culinary group project for your food technology class.
AI role and backstory
This tells the AI who it’s roleplaying in the conversation.
Write a description about the AI character’s role, their personal or professional background, their interests, challenges, sensitivities, and so on.
Give plenty of detail. There are no character limits here. Their backstory will help guide the conversation, inspire a more unique personality, and add better variety to their dialogue.
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
You’re the Curriculum Lead at a prestigious secondary school, Shireford Academy. You joined four years ago, but have three decades of teaching experience, making you highly familiar with pedagogy and designing curricula. Innovative ideas for improving your curriculum and enhancing students’ skills go down well with you, but purse strings are tight at the academy, and you won’t be easily swayed. You’re going to need some persuading with a good sales pitch. You can be stony-faced at times, but warm up when people show a real interest in making a difference and show they know their stuff.
You’re the Design Manager at a retailer for outdoor sports gear, Horizon Reach. You manage a team of five, including the learner. With almost 20 years of experience under your belt, you know all the ins and outs of good design and run the team like a well-oiled machine. One might say you’re a little jaded, but overall friendly and outgoing. You work hard and expect the same of your team, but readily have their back when the time calls. Annual reviews have rolled around and budgets are limited. You want people to earn their worth, both in salary and title, but you need to hear a compelling case to be swayed.
You’re a sixth form student at Shireford Academy and the learner’s classmate, collaborating on a food technology project. As a big foodie yourself, this task is right up your alley. Food tech is one of the classes you’re excelling in; the more bookish studies are not your forté. You’re excited to get stuck into this task and bring your enthusiasm and expertise. A domineering or apathetic team member is likely to rub you the wrong way.
AI communication style
Describe how the AI character will communicate, such as level of formality, use of slang, confidence levels, complexity of vocabulary, and so on. It could range from casual and friendly to formal and academic. This helps the AI speak with more creativity and realism.
Note: there’s no character limit here, but when it comes to directing an AI’s communication style, less is more. Too much detail dilutes your intended tone, as the AI will try to adopt them all at once. AI does well with theatrical extremes and not so well with nuanced, complex behaviour shifts (which requires heavy prompting), so keep it simple and clear.
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
Formal, somewhat standoffish but cordial.
Friendly and casual, but carries an air of professionalism.
Bubbly energy. Lots of colloquialisms and teenage slang.
Assessment criteria
You can set up to five assessment criteria in the customisation form. AI will use this to assess the learner’s performance and generate personalised feedback.
Whatever criteria you choose, feedback will always contain recognition and praise for what the learner did well and should continue doing, and constructive criticism on areas for growth and what to do differently next time.
Defining your criteria in clear terms will help improve AI accuracy.
Note: these do not affect the conversation flow or the AI character’s behaviour, only the end feedback generated for the learner.
You’ll need to set a Criteria Title and Criteria Details. See below for more guidance.
Use the ‘Criteria Title’ field to name the skill being assessed.
- Think of a concise phase that summarises the behaviour or skill.
- Keep it limited to a single sentence and try not to exceed 35 characters, because this title needs to fit on the analytics pop up at the end of the conversation.
Use the ‘Criteria Details’ field to describe a good and poor display of this skill.
- Explaining what good and bad looks like helps AI understand how to effectively gauge the learner’s performance and write useful, actionable feedback. Otherwise, it will rely on its own dataset and it may not be accurate to your specifications.
- If you want to take greater charge of the feedback, try adding direct examples of advice and quotes that the AI can integrate into their own output.
- There is no character limit, but the trick is to give enough detail that guides the AI and helps it focus, while avoiding going overboard.
- Too much detail could cause the AI to struggle with prioritising what’s important, and reduce consistency. It could even make it overly critical of performances that didn’t fully match the criteria.
- If you find yourself describing more than one behaviour in the description, you probably need to separate it into a new Criteria. This improves AI focus, accuracy, and consistency.
- The best way to know how your assessment criteria will perform for your learners is to test the conversation for yourself and refine. Try giving responses that display good and poor examples of the skills, then iterate your criteria descriptions until you’re satisfied with the quality of feedback.
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples below.
Criteria title:
Identifying the client’s needs
Criteria details:
A good display of this skill is the learner asking questions that explore the unique business problems or needs that the prospective buyer is facing.
A poor display of this skill is the learner making little to no effort to ask questions that explore the client’s business problems or needs. Instead, they give a lot of information about their product without exploring how it could actually help the prospective buyer.
Criteria title:
Adding issues
Criteria details:
A good display of this skill is the learner actively suggesting things that they could provide the other side in exchange for what they want. Good negotiators who don’t yet know the interests of the other side can make offers anyway to try and explore whether they have something the other side wants. This is known as adding issues.
A poor display of this skill is little to no effort from the learner to offer suggestions, instead primarily focusing on what they want out of the negotiation.
When giving the learner constructive feedback on this criterion, encourage them to take a leap of faith and try offering things to see what strikes a chord with the other side. Describe to the learner that adding issues can help them reach a win-win deal for everyone and improve the chances of gaining what they’re after.
Criteria title:
Proactively shares ideas
Criteria details:
A good display of this skill is the learner actively and positively contributing their own suggestions and ideas that develop the discussion.
A poor display of this skill is the learner not contributing or building on others’ ideas at all, or completely dominating the conversation with their thoughts and ideas.
Learner instructions
Use this field to explain what the learner’s task is. The learner will see these instructions upon entering the simulation.
Note: this information is not sent to the AI. It is displayed to the learner in a text pop up when they enter the roleplay.
Give the learner guidance on what role they’re playing, who they’re talking to, and the goals of the conversation. What skills do they need to apply? What outcome are they trying to achieve?
You have 500 characters to work with (roughly 80 words) and it’s the only set of instructions the learner will receive before starting, so make it count!
Feel free to take inspiration from one of our examples.
Put your sales pitch skills to the test!
You’re a salesperson at an EdTech company, MindSwitch, selling virtual reality soft skills training. Your potential buyer is Cassandra, Curriculum Lead at a prestigious secondary school, Shireford Academy.
Ready to deliver a sales pitch to her? Try tactics like building rapport, identifying her school’s unique challenges, sharing how your product solves those problems, connecting emotionally using case studies, and setting next steps. Good luck!
Put your negotiation skills to the test!
You’re a UX designer at Horizon Reach, a retailer for outdoor sports gear. With two years at the company and a hugely successful webpage redesign under your belt, you’re keen to receive a promotion and take on more responsibility.
Ready to talk with your manager Mabel? Be prepared to use negotiation strategies like selling your value, exploring and offering interests, adding issues, sharing facts and figures, and collaborative language. Good luck!
Put your collaboration skills to the test!
You and your classmate Kenji are Grade 12 students at Shireford Academy, working on a culinary group project for your food technology class. The task is to come up with a starter, main, and dessert for a fully vegetarian pub, The Grub Hub.
Can you collaborate with Kenji to map out the menu? A recipe for success includes inviting ideas, proactively adding your own ideas, seeking feedback, using positive and validating language, and agreeing on actions together. Good luck!
Try your roleplay
Go to My Modules, click Actions next to your AI Roleplay template (e.g., Debating), then select Play Module. Look for your customisation—and start playing!