How to Create a Tone of Voice (ToV) Skill for AI
Using AI to write content is incredibly helpful.
You can easily ideate & draft, but it always needs lots of editing.
And, the more AI learns about you, the better it writes… or not?
Being Consistent
Marketing is about consistency. You, your team, your product, support, success, everyone needs to follow the same guidelines.
Now, everyone is writing content.
But, how do they keep consistent on-brand?
A Tone of Voice skill shared across the company helps everyone writing in the same tone, use on-brand wording, and follow the same positioning to avoid confusion.
Creating a Tone of Voice for Claude (and not only)
In this newsletter, I will both guide you and provide the tools to create a tone of voice you can upload as a skill to Claude. The same doc can be used as instructions to other LLMs to teach them to speak like you.
This guide is split into two parts: The easy way to build a skill, the advanced way.
a) The Easy Way: An Interview
An interview skill will help Claude to ask questions, and based on your answers deliver the skill.
It will be asking a series of questions until it can fill up the whole skill as it is structured.
b) The Advanced Way: Scraping Your Content
This is intended for more ambitious and technically adept marketers who have a lot of content already written. You can either scrape your LinkedIn or upload your content from other platforms and let the AI do it’s work.
Build a ToV in a 15-minute Interview
A Tone of Voice Builder skill you upload to Claude. Download the skill, get it on Claude, and ask it to run the interview.
You say “help me build my tone of voice,” and it walks you through about ten short rounds:
Who you are, or what the brand is
Who you’re writing for (and just as important, who you’re not)
The values and beliefs you keep coming back to
The two to four adjectives that define how you sound
How your register shifts between a quick note and a formal document
Your language mechanics (tense, person, sentence rhythm)
The words that are unmistakably yours, and the ones that make you cringe
Your hard guardrails. The things the AI should never do in your name
At the end it spits out a finished, installable voice skill.
You upload it, and from then on it triggers automatically whenever you ask Claude to write for you.
Pro Tip: It’s a good idea to have project folders with instructions to call the skill when you are writing company or personal brand posts. This way, the skill is always prioritized when you use that project.
The Advanced Way: If You Already Have Content
If you’ve been publishing for a while, your real writing is a better source of truth than your self-description.
Or, it can be a great starting point to be consistent.
I have already created this toolkit for myself, and it helped me scrape my last 2 years of LinkedIn posts, comments, and newsletter.
What’s in it:
An instructions guide for exporting your LinkedIn archive and scraping your own posts, comments, and articles along with their performance data. (LinkedIn’s export takes about 24 hours, so request it before you need it.)
A scraper chrome extension with instructions to be customized to export your content. Right now, it has to identify you by name, so you need to use Claude Code to edit it for how your name is shown on LinkedIn.
Three channel-specific Voice Skill Builder prompts, one for each medium, because the same voice formats differently per channel:
Post Voice. How you open, structure, and close a social post. Hooks, line breaks, the lot.
Comment Voice. How you show up in someone else’s comment section, which is a genuinely different register from posting. Shorter, reactive, generous.
Article Voice. Long-form structure, section rhythm, how you carry an argument across 1,500 words.
Writing with AI vs Human Writers
AI is our enabler, and can be pretty helpful while at the same time push us to the wrong direction.
I use AI for drafting, expanding my thoughts, and improving the hooks, positioning, and keeping on brand.
There are three major problems (at least) to keep in mind:
Blindly trusting AI:
Letting AI write & post content about you without reviewing it should be a sin!
If you can’t read your own content, how do you expect other people to?
At the very least, read the content before posting, and I recommend reviewing the data, information, and doing a good editing.
Expertise vs silver-tongued liars:
AI is a silver-tongued liar, when you use AI to do something you have no expertise at, it can backfire spectacularly.
Prefer to use AI to deliver more and better content under your own expertise, content you can review, understand, and scrutinize.
You can work to expand your domain of knowledge, or support you in ways you might need another expertise, but you shouldn’t trust it… the further away it goes from your expertise, the more dangerous it can be.
Outsourcing thinking:
There is a fine line between having AI help, and outsourcing our ideas and thoughts to it. Our brain is a muscle and should be battle-tested and trained, not let to atrophy.