Tone of Voice

Customise Byword's language model
The Tone of Voice settings let you customise how Byword writes. You can configure tone of voice on generation pages, or on your account page. There, you'll see an option that looks something like this:
Clicking on the dropdown will let you select from a range of predefined tones of voice. This tone of voice will then be applied to all of your articles going forward.
Adding a tone of voice will help steer Byword in a specific writing direction, but it's not a guarantee that all of your articles will come out entirely in that tone of voice. For example, using the Humorous tone of voice will add pieces of humour throughout the article, but Byword makes no guarantees that the output will be comedy gold.
If you ever want to remove the tone of voice feature from your account, simply select Neutral from the dropdown. This will cause Byword to ignore the tone of voice feature, and simply write in its default, usual tone.

Customised Tones

If you want to have even more control over how Byword writes, you can click Customise above the tone of voice selector (see the image at the top of this article).
This will then enable a free-form text input, in which you can write a custom tone of voice.

Writing a good custom tone

This can be a powerful method for tailoring Byword to your use case, but it's important that you use it with care. Please bear in mind the following points:
  • Custom tones of voice should be written as adjectives.
    • Good examples are: motivational, philosophical, and cheeky.
    • Bad examples are: add humour, come across as an authority, and write in the style of shakespeare.
  • You can include conjunctions (i.e. and), though the shorter your tone of voice, the better!
    • A Good example is: lively and engaging.
    • A Bad example is: lively, engaging, to-the-point, inspiring and undeniably authentic.
  • Don't include full stops or unnecessary punctuation.
  • Don't worry about capitalisation (it doesn't affect output).

AI Detection

If you've already read the section on Avoiding AI Detection, you'll know that Byword is capable of avoiding AI detectors. Using this setting in conjunction with a tone of voice though can dilute the effects of the latter. For example, an article with a humorous tone of voice, and AI Detector Evasion turned on will be less humorous than one with AI Detection Evasion turned off.
That said, using a tone of voice on its own is often sufficient to avoid AI detection! AI detectors primarily work by looking for certain choices of words, however using a tone of voice tends to change that choice of words to an extent that fools AI detectors.

So, what should I do?

  • If you don't want to use a tone of voice but do want to avoid AI detection: leave your tone of voice as neutral(/blank), and turn on AI Detector Evasion.
  • If you want to use a tone of voice and evade AI detection: set your desired tone of voice, and leave AI Detection Evasion off (the tone of voice will generally be sufficient to avoid detection).

Samples

Byword currently supports 11 tones of voice, and of course it'd be prohibitively expensive to sample each one just to see what they're like.
To that end, I've put together a set of samples; 3 articles with exactly the same titles, written in each tone of voice. You can see them here (change the dropdown in the top-right to view the different tones of voice).