How to Build a Custom AI Brand Voice for Review Replies

Your brand voice is one of the few things competitors cannot copy. It is how customers recognise you before they have read your name. On reviews it matters even more, because a reply is public — every future customer reading that listing sees how you talk to people.

Most AI reply tools give you a handful of preset tones. Inform ships five of them: Friendly, Quirky, Humourous, Formal and Optimistic. They cover the common cases well. But a preset is a category, not a personality. It cannot know that you always sign off as "— the team at Rathburn", that you never apologise twice in one reply, or that your brand writes in sentence case and never uses exclamation marks.

The usual workaround is to keep the AI at arm's length and fix its output by hand. That typically means:

• Writing a brand voice document and hoping every team member reads it.
• Generating an AI reply, then editing the tone before posting.
• Keeping a spreadsheet of approved phrases and sign-offs.
• Re-training new staff every time someone joins the support rota.

This works at ten reviews a month. At two hundred, across six locations, with three people sharing the inbox, it does not. Consistency quietly degrades — and the replies that slip through are the ones customers screenshot.

It would be dishonest to claim the big platforms cannot do this. Birdeye's Brand AI genuinely does custom brand voice, and does it thoroughly — you can upload a PDF, point it at a URL or paste text, and it will infer your brand personality and writing style, with custom prompts and tone controls on top. Podium sits in similar territory with a comparable feature set.

The problem is not capability. It is what it costs to switch the feature on.

• Birdeye lists around $299 per location per month on Starter, rising to roughly $349 on Growth and $449 on Dominate, and the lowest rate assumes annual billing. Five locations on Growth is about $1,745 a month — near $21,000 a year before add-ons.
• Podium runs a broadly similar pricing grid for a broadly similar scope.
• Both price per location, so the bill grows with exactly the thing that made you want automation in the first place.

There is also a practical cost. Uploading brand documents and tuning inferred personality traits is a project someone has to own. For a five-location restaurant group, the honest requirement is usually one paragraph — sound warm, keep it short, never say "unfortunately", sign off as the team — and a paragraph should not require a procurement cycle.

Inform's answer is a 500-character text box, on every plan including the free one.

Inform adds a sixth option to the voice picker: Custom. Instead of choosing a preset, you describe your brand voice in your own words, and every AI reply — whether you generate it manually from the Reviews page or let the weekly auto-reply handle it — follows that description.

There is no prompt engineering and no syntax to learn. You write instructions the way you would brief a new hire.

If you are new to Inform, sign in first and connect your locations:

• Visit informreviews.net and log in with your Google account.
• Go to Org Settings > Integrations and select the locations you want AI replies for.
• Open the first tab in Org Settings, where all your AI voice settings live.

The AI Voices panel shows each preset with a sample reply, so you can preview the tone before committing. At the end of that list is Custom, described as "Uses your custom brand voice description".

Selecting it opens a dialog where you write the description itself.

You get 500 characters. That is deliberately short — it forces the description to be instructions rather than an essay, and short instructions are the ones the AI follows most reliably.

The in-app tip is the best guide to what belongs in there: include tone, do and don't rules, length, and any sign-off. A solid starting point looks like the recommended example:

Warm but concise. Uses mild humor. Avoids over-apologizing. Signs off with "- Team X".

A few patterns worth borrowing:

• Tone plus a limit. "Friendly but never more than three sentences."
• An explicit ban. "Never use the words unfortunately or sincerely."
• A fixed sign-off. "Always end with — the team at Rathburn Eye Care."
• A register. "Sentence case only. No exclamation marks."

Save it, and every reply generated from that point forward uses the description.

The feature does not quietly water down what you write. Whatever you describe is what you get — which is easiest to appreciate with a deliberately extreme example.

Here is a real five-star review answered by a custom voice set to reply in all capitals, in the style of a well-known cartoon character, with a funny greeting and sign-off every time.

Nobody is suggesting you reply to optometry patients in all caps. The point is the range. If the AI will faithfully hold a voice that far from the default, it will comfortably hold the much subtler one your brand actually needs — the dry one, the formal one, the one that always mentions the neighbourhood by name.

That is the difference between picking a tone and owning a voice.

A custom voice does not replace the rest of your controls — it layers on top of them. The phrases you have told Inform to use or avoid still apply, so you can write a loose, characterful description and still guarantee that certain words never appear.

If you have not set those yet, they live in the same settings area and are worth five minutes.

Yes. The description is stored on your organisation, so it applies both when you generate a reply by hand from the Reviews page and when the weekly auto-reply answers reviews for you. You set it once.

Up to 500 characters. Shorter, more specific instructions generally produce more consistent replies than long descriptive passages — write rules, not prose.

Yes, at any time. Reopen the AI Voices panel and choose any of the five presets. Your custom description is kept, so you can switch back without rewriting it.

Yes. Phrases to use and phrases to avoid are applied alongside the voice, so your blocklist keeps working no matter how the custom voice is written.

Most tools let you pick a tone. Inform lets you define one:

• ✅ A voice you write yourself — not a category chosen from a dropdown.
• ✅ Applies everywhere — manual replies and weekly auto-replies both follow it.
• ✅ Specific rules stick — sign-offs, banned words and length limits are honoured.
• ✅ Guardrails still apply — your phrase blocklist works alongside the custom voice.
• ✅ Free to use — no per-seat fee to sound like yourself.

Related guides

• Learn how to make replies completely hands-free.
• Or see how to send authentic, personalised replies.