Describe a product concept. An AI panel of synthetic consumers reacts in their own words, and Semantic Similarity Rating maps those reactions to a realistic 1–5 purchase-intent distribution — plus the rationales behind it. Based on Maier et al. (2025).
How it works. Each synthetic consumer is a persona-conditioned LLM
(gemini-3.5-flash) that replies in free text. Replies are embedded locally
and compared to five Likert anchor statements per reference set; cosine similarities
become a probability distribution over 1–5 (averaged across six anchor sets).
Direct numeric prompting collapses to "3"; SSR recovers realistic spread. Validity depends
on the model having seen real discussion of the product category.