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A persona defines the caller’s identity, personality, language, and speech settings. The test describes the situation. Reuse a persona across tests when you want the same kind of caller in different situations.

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Use an existing persona

List the personas available to the repository’s project:
Egma includes Everyday caller, a patient, cooperative caller. Add the name to your test’s front matter:
Every test must name at least one persona. Adding a second persona creates a second simulation for that test in each run. On push, Egma resolves a name to its persona ID. Pulled files include that ID. Keep it when you edit the test. If two personas have the same name, use the ID from egma persona list to select the one you mean. Selecting a persona for the first time saves its default model and voice settings for your project. All tests in that project that select the persona share those settings. Test files keep the persona selection; egma pull and egma push do not copy model settings into the file.

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Choose models and a voice

Open the persona in Personas. Select Use to save its first settings, Edit settings for a provided persona, or Edit for a custom persona. Choose the language model, speech-to-text model, text-to-speech model, voice, and speech rate. The supported speech rate is 0.6 through 1.5; 1 is the normal rate. You can enter a voice ID from the selected provider even if it is not in the recommended list. These choices belong to your project. Saving them does not change the persona’s behavior version or another project’s settings. Defaults are saved on first use and do not replace the choices you have already saved.

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Create a persona

Open Personas in your project and select New persona.
  1. Enter a Name that your team can recognize, such as Caller in a hurry.
  2. Set Identity name to the name the caller gives the agent, such as Morgan Chen.
  3. Write a Personality that describes how the caller acts. For example: Answers briefly, asks for the earliest appointment, and asks the agent to get to the point if it repeats a question. Remains polite.
  4. Choose the Language and review the language, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech models. Use the supplied choices, then set the voice and speech rate if the test needs them.
  5. Select Create persona, run egma persona list, and add the persona to your test.
Keep the caller’s goal in the scenario. Keep lasting traits in the persona. The library Name is for your team; Identity name is what the agent hears. To start from an existing persona, open its menu and select Clone. This copies the current behavior and your project’s effective settings into an independent custom persona. Select the clone in your tests to use it. Custom personas are available only in the project that owns them.

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Understand changes and versions

Changing a custom persona’s identity, personality, or language creates a new immutable behavior version. Its name, description, and project model settings can change without creating a behavior version. Version history is read-only. For API behavior edits, send the current versionId as expectedVersionId; read the persona again if another edit changed that version. Egma maintains the behavior of provided personas. Compatible updates apply to future runs while keeping your project’s model settings and test selections. Clones do not receive updates from their source. A run saves each selected persona’s current behavior version and complete project settings when it is created. Queued simulations and retries keep that selection. After changing behavior or settings, start a new run to use them.

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Bring your own provider keys

Add your keys in Settings → Provider API Keys. Provider keys and model choices are separate settings. Your keys also apply to predefined personas and model graders. Code graders do not make model calls.