Twots: AI-Powered Interactive Mascots
Brand mascots are a known engagement mechanism: they give a brand a face, a voice, a personality that audiences relate to more easily than a logo. The problem is that a static mascot is a design asset. It does not engage back.
Twots was built to make mascots interactive: GPT-powered characters that could hold real-time conversations with an audience in the mascot's established voice and persona. Marketers and influencers define the character, Twots makes it conversational.
What We Built
AI Mascot Engine
- Character creation interface: name, personality parameters, tone, and backstory that trained the mascot's conversational behavior
- GPT-powered real-time conversation: the mascot responded in character, consistently, without the creator needing to be present
- Adaptive responses that maintained persona coherence across varied question types
- Context retention within a session: the mascot remembered what was said earlier in the conversation
Engagement Platform
- Embeddable mascot widget for websites and campaign landing pages
- Direct link format for influencer audiences: send your audience to a conversation, not a page
- Conversation volume tracking: see what your audience is actually asking about
- Customizable visual presentation: mascot design and color to match brand identity
Campaign Integration
- Deployable for specific campaigns with scoped topic focus: a product launch mascot that only discusses the launch
- Multiple mascot support: different characters for different brand contexts
- Analytics on conversation topics, session length, and engagement depth
The AI Design Challenge
A conversational mascot that breaks character kills the experience immediately. We invested in the persona definition layer: the interface that let creators specify not just what the mascot knows, but how it speaks, what it declines to discuss, and how it handles questions outside its scope. This made the mascot consistently feel like a character rather than a language model with a costume.
My Role
- Led product design and AI integration from concept to deployment
- Designed the mascot creation interface and conversation management system
- Built the GPT-powered conversation engine with persona coherence controls
- Implemented the embeddable widget and campaign analytics layer
- Managed deployment and post-launch optimization