Digital Twin of Customer

Delve AI’s Digital Twin of the Customer software is part of our wider suite of synthetic research tools that supplement traditional human research. You can use it to chat with the personas you’ve previously generated using our AI Persona Generator and get human-like feedback on anything from a social post to an email copy.

It works best as a high-velocity sandbox to stress-test concepts, refine hypotheses, and explore customer segments before testing with live audiences.

Get started with digital twins

Every workspace starts with 50 free credits, enough for about 2-3 questions, to see how digital twins work before you pay. But to chat with a twin, you first need a persona.

You can build one with our free audience persona generator.

• Sign up or log in to Delve AI.
• Go to Personas > Audience Persona from the menu.
• Describe your target audience (and/or upload your SparkToro audience reports).
• Click “Generate persona.”

Once your persona is ready, you can chat with them. Simply click “Chat” in the Audience Persona overview, or the message icon in the top right corner of the dashboard, to start chatting with its digital twin.

You can also access chat by navigating to Digital Twins from the sidebar.

The free credits let you test the feature and get basic feedback on new products, features, or campaigns. When you're comfortable with how it works, try digital twins with our other persona tools, like Customer Persona, and upload additional materials (eg, landing page design, social media post, display ads) for review.

Chat in multiple languages

You can get digital twin responses for different markets, channels, and product lines in over 15 languages. To choose yours:

• Click Account from the sidebar menu in the dashboard.
• Select User Profile.
• Under User details, open the Language dropdown.
• Pick a single language, or select Auto-detect.

Auto-detect lets you ask questions in any supported language without going through settings all the time. The twin responds in that same language.

Currently, Delve AI supports these languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Maintain brand voice

Set your brand voice so every response stays consistent with how your brand communicates. Ideally, you should do this before you start chatting with digital twins.

Go to Settings > Brand Voice, and under Guidelines, fill in the following:

• Summary: Describe your brand's personality and how you communicate with your audience. For example, "Our voice is informative."
• Do: Add instructions for tone, writing style, vocabulary, and messaging.
• Don't: List common brand voice mistakes to avoid.

Optionally, you can upload samples for reference. Supported file types are PDF, TXT, JPG, and PNG.

Create digital twin group chats

A group chat lets you ask several digital twins the same question at once and compare their answers side by side.

To create a group:

• Go to Digital Twins > Groups.
• Click Overview, then “Create new group.”
• Enter a group name.
• Select the personas to include.
• Choose persona type(s) (e.g., Research Persona),
• Then, add a segment (e.g., Anyen Dagkar, Follower).
• Hit “Create group.”

In a group chat, differences between twins usually tell you more than agreement does. Use it to test a message, offer, or campaign concept across persona segments and see how each one reacts to the same idea. Treat the differences you find as hypotheses to confirm with real customers.

Estimate chat credit usage

Chat credits are what you spend to talk to your digital twins. Every message you send, and every response you get, uses credits. The amount depends on:

• the length of your message
• the length of the digital twin's response
• whether you upload an image or file (typically uses more credits because it takes more processing)

A short text exchange uses very few credits. Longer conversations and file/image-based requests use more.

Digital Twin of Customer runs on a pay-as-you-go model. You buy credits in batches and choose the batch size that suits your needs. The lowest tier gives you 2,000 credits, roughly 100 questions, for USD 39. When your credits run out, you’re charged for the next batch at your plan's price. On the lowest tier, that's another USD 39.

Credits are valid for 12 months from the date of purchase. To see how many you have left, go to Settings > Subscriptions > Usage in your dashboard.

Set up digital twins in Slack

You can also chat with your digital twins from team collaboration tools like Slack. To start, open Delve AI and pick the business you want to connect. Then, complete the following steps:

• Go to Settings > select Notifications.
• Click "Add to Slack.”

• Choose your workspace.
• Pick the channel that should receive the posts.
• Finally, review the app permissions and click “Allow.”

Once connected, you can use the slash command "/ask-persona" to chat with your persona segments anytime, without leaving your workspace.

How to ask good questions

The key to getting useful responses without wasting chat credits is asking straightforward, to-the-point questions.

To get the most from each chat:

• Ask about behavior, not intent: "Would you buy this?" invites polite, generic answers. Scenario questions work better, such as "Walk me through the last time you switched tools, and what almost stopped you."
• Invite pushback: AI personas can be too agreeable. Ask what would make them say no, what they'd compare it against, and what feels unconvincing. Keep your wording neutral.
• Show, don't just describe: Attach files, real ads, pages, or pricing sheets and say what feedback you want. Concrete material gets more specific answers.
• Check consistency: Ask the same question in two different ways. If the answers change, treat that finding as weak.

Keep a record of what you asked, what came back, and what you learned from each conversation. It makes your ideas easy to re-test later.

Best use cases for digital twins

Digital twins are useful for message testing and product plus campaign optimization. They give you fast, cost-effective feedback when real responses are scarce or privacy-restricted.

Here are some of the best ways to use them:

• Explore early-stage concepts. When you have little context or quantitative data, use a twin for low-stakes exploration of a new product idea before you commit budget to primary research.
• Pressure-test messaging. Draft a new pitch or campaign, then ask the digital twin of your target persona whether the positioning resonates.
• Test different types of content. Share social posts, blog drafts, email copy, reels, or videos and see how each segment responds.
• Review product designs and layouts. Attach mockups and ask what stands out, what confuses, and what feels off.
• Sharpen survey and discussion guides. Run a draft screener past a twin to catch confusing wording before you send it to a larger group.
• Generate hypotheses before real qualitative work. Ask what a decision-maker might object to in a pitch, so your moderator's guide for the actual focus group is sharper.
• Explore early-stage concepts. When you have little context or quantitative data, use a twin for low-stakes exploration of a new product idea before you commit budget to primary research.
• Rehearse pitch narratives internally. Have account executives practice objection handling with a digital twin before a real renewal meeting.

How not to use digital twins

Digital twin responses are AI-generated outputs. Although they’re built on personas that draw on real customer data, they can still miss context or get things wrong. So don’t use personas, digital twin chats, or synthetic research outputs as legal, financial, or professional advice.

You are solely responsible for independently verifying insights before making critical business decisions.

Be cautious when researching:

• Vulnerable groups
• Unfamiliar markets
• Emerging behaviors
• Innovative products and services
• Complex lived experiences shaped by identity, culture, or emotion

AI learns from past behavior, while innovation often calls for new behaviors and attitudes. Twins may work well for simple improvements, but not for genuinely novel ideas.

Never use digital twin responses:

• as absolute evidence in a report or client deliverable
• in emotionally charged or trust-sensitive moments
• as final validation of price or renewal risk

Also, avoid pasting sensitive personal data into chats, and check that your use matches your privacy policy. You should never skip compliance review before anything goes external, and never count repeated chats as a real sample.