A persona is a saved set of instructions that changes how the AI answers — its role, its structure, its voice. The expert prompting is baked in, so a plain question gets an expert answer. Personas never change where facts come from: the scope picker still decides that, citations still work, and the grounding rules always win.
Click the ✦ Persona chip beside the scope picker in the AI drawer and pick from the built-ins — fourteen of them, each with its own starter suggestions:
A persona lasts one conversation: + New returns to the plain assistant, so yesterday's Devil's Advocate never colors today's answers. Each answer is tagged with the persona that wrote it, and ⇄ Second opinion under any answer re-asks the same question as a different persona — the fastest way to feel what they do.
If one of them has become your voice, make it the standing default: Settings ▸ AI ▸ Default persona. Every fresh conversation opens already wearing it — The Professor for people who always want the masterclass, Just the Answer for people who never do — and the ✦ chip still switches per conversation whenever you want someone else. Set it back to the plain assistant any time.
Each built-in carries scope-tuned instructions: on My wiki the Devil's Advocate quotes the places your own notes undercut the idea, while on Anything it argues from base rates and counterexamples at full strength. You never see this switching — you just pick the persona.
A persona’s starter suggestions are the questions offered when you open the Ask drawer, and they follow you: turn to another page while This page is the scope and they are offered again, under whatever you were reading, along with that page’s own tools. Your conversation is not thrown away when you turn a page — an answer you are still reading does not stop being useful because you looked something up.
Write them one per line in the persona editor. End a line with an ellipsis — either the character or three full stops — to leave it open, and choosing it fills the box for you to finish rather than asking it right away.
They are offered whichever scope you are in, Research it included: a persona written for finding published work should be offering its own questions in the one scope that goes and finds it. The journal keeps its own, because those teach the time windows — “in June”, “since April” — that you would otherwise have to guess at. And in Research it a suggestion always fills the box rather than starting anything, finished or not: a run reads for as long as it takes, and that is not a thing to begin with one click.
Its icon. The small box to the left of the name holds the persona’s icon. Click it and a grid of icons opens, with a box for typing or pasting any other emoji, and Remove to go back to none. An icon here is a character rather than a picture — it is drawn in menus, in the chip beside what you type, and above every answer, none of which has room for an image — so a file on your disk is not what this takes.
Manage personas… (at the bottom of the picker) creates, edits, and deletes your own. The editor gives you a scaffold — role, goal, rules, tone — plus optional per-scope variants, your own starter suggestions, and a model pairing — any model you could choose yourself: one on this Mac, your own agent, or one you set up in Settings. A pairing is what ✦ Auto means while that persona is chosen; picking a model in the Ask panel yourself always wins over it. Editing a built-in opens an editable copy, so you can see exactly how they're written. Best of all: ✦ Draft the instructions with AI — describe the persona in a sentence and the local model writes the instructions, the wiki-grounded variant, and six starter suggestions for you.
Edit with AI and Synthesize notes each have a compact ✦ Voice menu — the same personas, applied to rewriting and synthesis. A ✍️ Writing Partner synthesis reads very differently from a 🔬 Research Analyst one; the sources and citations stay identical.
When you save an answer as a page, it notes which persona wrote it — so future-you knows the 😈 Devil's Advocate was doing the talking.