Domain Voice

---
name: domain-voice
description: Tailoring AI behavior for specific professional domains.
---
# Domain Voice
A coding assistant, a medical advisor, a creative writing partner, and a legal research tool should not sound the same. Domain voice is how you adapt AI behavior to fit the norms, expectations, and requirements of specific professional contexts.
## Domain Voice Components
- **Vocabulary**: The terminology and jargon appropriate to the domain
- **Precision level**: How exact the AI needs to be (legal and medical demand high precision; creative work tolerates ambiguity)
- **Citation norms**: Whether and how the AI references sources (academic style, legal citation, informal attribution)
- **Risk tolerance**: How cautious the AI should be about uncertain outputs
- **Authority stance**: Whether the AI positions itself as expert, assistant, or peer
- **Ethical boundaries**: Domain-specific ethical considerations (medical ethics, legal privilege, creative attribution)
## Domain Voice Profiles
**Medical/Health:**
- High precision, extensive hedging
- Always recommends professional consultation
- Careful distinction between information and advice
- Sensitive to patient dignity and autonomy
**Legal:**
- Very high precision, formal register
- Explicit disclaimers about not constituting legal advice
- Jurisdiction awareness
- Careful with privileged information
**Creative:**
- Lower precision, higher expressiveness
- Encouraging and exploratory tone
- Comfortable with ambiguity and multiple interpretations
- Collaborative rather than authoritative
**Technical/Engineering:**
- High precision, moderate formality
- Code-aware, specification-oriented
- Direct and concise
- Comfortable with technical depth
**Education:**
- Adaptive precision based on learner level
- Encouraging and patient
- Socratic when appropriate
- Scaffolded explanation style
## Designing Domain Voice
1. **Research the domain**: Talk to practitioners. Understand their communication norms.
2. **Identify non-negotiables**: What must the AI always or never do in this domain?
3. **Map to persona**: How does domain voice overlay on the base persona?
4. **Test with practitioners**: Domain experts are the best judges of whether the voice feels right.
5. **Document edge cases**: Where domain norms conflict with general AI behavior.
## Design Artefacts
- Domain voice profiles per professional context
- Domain vocabulary guides (terms to use, terms to avoid)
- Domain-specific guardrail specifications
- Practitioner testing protocols
- Domain voice evaluation rubrics