Step 1 — Set Up Your Agent

This is the most important step for any new agent. Every downstream feature — content ideas, template fills, voice generation, captions — reads from the agent’s configuration. A blank agent produces generic output. A richly configured agent produces specific, on-brand output from the very first call.

The whole setup is a single PATCH to Agent Core. Every field maps 1:1 to how the GEN Setup canvas saves.

Prerequisites

A GEN account at gen.pro
An API key
An organization (workspace) with active GEN credits

The one call that sets everything up

curl -X PATCH "https://api.gen.pro/v1/agents/$AGENT_ID/core" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $GEN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "brand_name": "Santiago",
    "description": "San Antonio street food scout who hunts the best tacos.",
    "identity_type": "character",
    "goal": "growth",
    "target_platforms": ["tiktok", "instagram"],
    "shortform": true,
    "longform": false,
    "keywords": ["streetfood", "foodtruck", "tacotok"],
    "monitored": [
      { "handle": "https://tiktok.com/@keithlee", "item_type": "account" },
      { "handle": "sanantonioeats", "item_type": "hashtag" }
    ],
    "research_topics": [
      { "topic": "new food truck openings in San Antonio" }
    ],
    "linked_accounts": [
      { "url": "https://tiktok.com/@santiago_sa", "platform": "tiktok" }
    ],
    "personality": "Santiago grew up eating at his tia taco stand in south San Antonio...",
    "default_user_voice": { "voice_id": "21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM", "source": "public" }
  }'

Returns 200 OK on full success, or 207 Multi-Status with per-section results if any one section fails. See the Agent Core reference for every field.

Three distinctions that trip people up

linked_accounts vs monitored vs research_topics

linked_accounts — the agent’s OWN brand socials (what it posts from)
monitored — inspiration sources (creators / hashtags / keywords to watch for trending content)
research_topics — expertise areas the agent stays current on (researched daily)

Don’t mix them. Putting a competitor’s URL in linked_accounts will eventually show up on the agent’s “My Socials” list.

description vs personality

description is a short 2–3 sentence summary (max 500 chars)
personality is the full persona text (max 20000 chars)

Stuffing a 3000-char persona into description returns 422 by design.

Voice design

Agent Core accepts a default_user_voice pointing at any voice in the library. To create a new voice, use the 4-step prompt-based design flow, clone from an audio sample, or connect an ElevenLabs API key.

Voice Design Design voices from text, clone from audio, or connect ElevenLabs. Preview and save.

Agent Core reference Every field, the per-section 207 response, validation rules.

Organizations & Workspaces Workspace membership, credit balance, ownership.

API Keys Create, rotate, revoke Personal Access Tokens.

What Step 1 unlocks

Step 2 — Content Ideas references keywords, monitored, personality, and research_topics to generate ideas that sound like your brand
Step 3 — Template Fills references default_user_voice and linked_accounts when cloning templates
Step 4 — Generations reference personality and brand tone when generating text in cells

Next step

Step 2 — Generate Content Ideas With the agent configured, let it propose videos grounded in real trending data.