Personas

Personas are reusable profiles that shape how Pia’s assistant replies — its identity, voice, tone, expertise, and even which tools and model it uses. Pia ships with built-in personas you can use right away, and you can create your own.

Viewing your personas

Open Settings → Assistant → Personas to see a grid of persona cards. Each card shows the persona’s name and emoji, and a Built-in badge marks the ones that ship with Pia:

• Pia · Personal — a warm, friendly everyday assistant
• Pia · Business — a crisp, to-the-point work assistant
• Experienced Coder — a precise, senior software engineer
• Marketing Writer — a punchy, persuasive copywriter
• Financial Expert — a measured, numbers-savvy analyst
• Worldwide Company CEO — strategic and decisive
• Explain It Simply — plain-language explanations for any topic (no tools, by design)

Creating a persona

1. Open Settings → Assistant → Personas
2. Click Add Persona to open the edit dialog
3. Fill in the fields (see below)
4. Click Save

Here’s what each field does:

• Describe this persona — an optional box where you can describe what you want. Click Draft with AI to auto-fill the other fields for you (using your current default model).
• Name (required) — what the persona is called.
• Tagline — a short subtitle.
• System Prompt (required) — the core identity and voice instructions. This does most of the work.
• Guardrails — optional limits on what the persona should and shouldn’t do.
• Output Format — an optional reply style. Leave it blank to use the app default.
• Archetype — a dropdown: assistant, analyst, creative, visionary, explainer, or custom.
• Expertise — comma-separated topic tags.
• Emoji and Accent Colour — pick from a popup picker; used for the persona’s avatar and card.
• Tool Access — None, Read-only, or Full. None stops the assistant from using any tools while this persona is active. (Read-only is reserved for a future release and currently behaves the same as Full.)
• Preferred Provider — which AI model the persona uses. Leave it blank to use your default for the mode.
• Reasoning Effort — how much thinking the persona puts into replies. Leave it blank to use the provider default.

Tip

Not sure where to start? Type a quick description in Describe this persona and click Draft with AI.

Editing, duplicating, and deleting

• Duplicate — duplicate any persona (built-in or custom) to make an editable copy.
• Edit — click the pencil button on a custom persona’s card to make changes.
• Delete — click the trash button to remove a custom persona.

Note

Built-in personas can’t be edited or deleted — they only offer Duplicate. To customise one, duplicate it and edit the copy. Custom personas sync across your devices; built-ins don’t.

Choosing a persona in chat

In the Assistant, use the persona dropdown in the message bar, just to the left of Send. It has no text label, but hovering shows a Personas tooltip; each entry shows the persona’s glyph, name, and accent colour.

Your choice is remembered: the assistant keeps using that persona for new replies, and it syncs across your devices. If you’ve never chosen one, Pia uses Pia · Business in Business mode and Pia · Personal otherwise. (Personas apply to the Assistant only — Optimize mode doesn’t use them.)

Switching applies forward only — earlier messages keep the persona they were made with, so one conversation can contain replies from more than one persona. Individual chats don’t pin a persona; the picker sets it for the assistant as a whole.

What a persona changes

While a persona is active, it shapes each Assistant reply:

• Identity & voice — its System Prompt replaces the assistant’s default personality, with Guardrails and Output Format layered on top.
• Tools — a persona set to None turns tools off for its replies. (This is why Explain It Simply can’t use tools.)
• Model — if it has a Preferred Provider, that model is used instead of your mode default.
• Reasoning effort — if set, it overrides the effort for that reply.

Seeing which persona answered

Each assistant reply is attributed to the persona that produced it:

• A small persona avatar (its emoji) sits beside the message.
• The footer shows Tokens · persona · model, for example:

42 Tokens · Financial Expert · Claude Sonnet 4.5

This attribution is captured per message, so it stays correct even if you later rename or delete that persona, and it shows up in your chat history too. Voice-mode replies are attributed the same way.

Next steps

Want to give every new conversation a head start? Head to Templates.