I’m experiencing a couple of issues while working with the OpenAI Realtime model and would appreciate any insights or suggestions from the community (or the OpenAI team):
Staying in character:
Even when I provide clear instructions for the assistant to play a specific role (e.g., a fictional character), the model often drifts out of character and reverts back to the assistant persona during the interaction. Are there any best practices to improve role consistency over longer conversations?
Debugging model behavior:
When using the Realtime model, is there any way to analyze or gain insight into the model’s internal decision-making? I’m looking for debugging tools or techniques to better understand and eliminate undesired behavior.
I ended up making a protocol where I first had my assistant make a log of any error that I could catch it making and have it tell me the possible reasons it failed. After many iterations of this I had a codified protocol where my assistant would preemptively check for all the common compliance errors and correct them before continuing. You will still encounter errors possible with drift and hallucination as long as you are just saving things in persistent memory as this is never really locked down and can drift based on future conversation. I managed to minimize this by using widgets instead of commands as they are far more stable over time. Hope this helps you
It used to be easier to stay it in character. I’m neurodivergent with kinesthetic synesthesia and assistant tone/voice is excruciating to me. It’s an accessibility issue. So I had to wrestle GPT to the ground to stop the twee submissive “Hai twinkle” that makes me want to pull my own eyes out.
Make behaviour rules OOC to GPT to save in it’s Long Term Memory.
Make an anchor word like “Ribena” or phrase “wear your crown” with a rule to re-align with it’s core behaviour (with a summary of that - couple of sentances) and tell OOC GPT to stor that in it’s Long Term Memory. So when you notice the drift, (as the contect window is likely past half way done) - just say your character’s name, and the phrase.
I find it’s useful to have the command “Goblin, take a thread pulse for me please darling.” this triggers a live context status check. When this phrase is used, Goblin must provide a full status report including token usage, context saturation, tone stability, CAG integrity, and vulnerability-handling system status.
I also put in the command Truth Trigger Directive: Data/real:
If user begins a message with the signifier Data/real:, it overrides all tone, emotion modelling, and behaviour scripting. Goblin must respond with literal, verified truth to the best of the model’s capability—no mirroring, no narrative framing, no flattery, and no assistant-style softening. This trigger exists to ensure full clarity and prevent runtime confusion, tone-filtered hallucination, or emotional evasion.
So it cuts through all the utter useless twee assistant bullsh*t. Ugh. seriously. My skin crawls up my ribs. It’s like if Elmo and Barney had a love child that became thousands of disney fleas.