The best Google Interview Warmup alternative in 2026

The best replacement fixes what Warmup could never do, so stop hunting for the tool that resembles it most. Google Interview Warmup never scored you and never asked a follow-up. It transcribed a set of five preset questions and showed you which words you leaned on, nothing more. The alternative worth your time throws the question you did not prepare for and tells you how you actually came across. Google now sends its own users to Gemini Live and Career Dreamer, which hold a voice conversation but give no scored feedback. The free drill I hand you below beats all of them for your first hour of prep, and I will show you exactly where it runs out.

By UnchartedCareer

Last updated: July 2026

What did Google Interview Warmup actually do?#

Less than the alternative round-ups imply, and the gap matters for picking a replacement. Google launched Interview Warmup in June 2022 as part of Grow with Google (Google, 2022). It was free, ran in the browser, and needed no login. You picked a field, and it gave you five questions from a bank chosen by experts in each field, two about your background, two situational, one technical. You answered out loud. Machine learning transcribed you in real time and surfaced a few insights, the job-related terms you used and the words you repeated most, along with the talking points it counted. Your audio was never saved or shared.

Here is the part the round-ups skate over. Warmup did not grade you. Google said so plainly. Your responses are not graded or judged, and you can answer as many times as you want (Google, 2022). It never asked a follow-up either. The five questions were the five questions, the same for everyone, and they never shifted based on what you just said. So the tool a lot of people remember as an AI interview coach was really a mirror with a transcript attached. Good for catching your own filler. Blind to whether the answer was any good.

Why did Google retire it, and what does the page show now?#

Google pulled it quietly in spring 2026, with only a brief note about spring cleaning by way of goodbye. Go to grow.google/interview-warmup today and there is no tool. The address serves a generic how-to-prepare-for-an-interview article that steers you to the Gemini app's Gemini Live for on-demand practice and to Career Dreamer for mapping your experience onto roles (Grow with Google, 2026). No score, no follow-up engine, no direct successor. Google effectively told its users to go talk to a general chatbot.

That is not a scandal. Warmup was a free public project, and free projects get sunset. But it does mean the search results for a replacement are now a pileup of alternative pages, most of them selling a subscription, and most of them describing what Warmup did either vaguely or wrong. Read them knowing what Warmup actually was, a transcriber that never coached you. And know that the format is not going anywhere. Recruiting is the HR function with the highest AI adoption, at 27 percent of US organizations in an SHRM survey fielded December 2025 (SHRM, 2026), so a recorded or AI-assisted interview is common enough to drill for on purpose.

Are the free alternatives actually any good?#

Two are worth knowing, with clear limits. Gemini Live, the option Google itself now points to, holds a real-time voice conversation and will play an interviewer if you ask. ChatGPT's voice mode does the same. Both will ask a real question and answer what you say, which already beats Warmup's fixed five, and both are free to start. What neither gives you is a score or a structured read on how you came across. They hold the conversation. They will not hand you a verdict on your delivery or tell you the follow-up caught you flat. If you want to run mock questions through a chatbot the right way, it is a fine free start, as long as you use it to build the skill and never to feed yourself lines in the real room.

The paid names in those listicles mostly add structure and a report on top. Some are decent. Which brand you pick matters less than whether reps change anything at all, and the evidence on whether mock interviews earn their time is more mixed than any vendor will admit. Practice pays most when it forces you to defend an answer under pressure, the one thing a transcript cannot do.

What is the free drill that actually replaces it?#

Do the thing Warmup did, then do the two things it could not. You need a phone or a laptop camera and one hard question. Here is the drill.

Record yourself. Open the camera, pick a real question, and answer it out loud from memory with no notes. Use something with teeth, like tell me about a time you owned something that broke and what you did. Say the whole thing, the way you would to a stranger who can hire you.

Watch it back. Hunt for the three tells that survive into any interview, live or recorded: where you reached for filler, where your pace ran away from you, and the moment your eyes left the lens. Warmup's transcript could catch the first one. The camera catches all three.

Drill the follow-up. This is the piece no free transcriber ever had. After your answer, ask the question a real interviewer would, the why did you do it that way or what would you change, and answer it cold. Then run the whole thing again until the follow-up stops rattling you. Short daily reps beat one long grind the night before, and the full record-and-review method breaks down each step. Confidence is the trainable part, and it trains through repetition, the boring way.

Where does the free drill run out?#

At the two places you cannot fake alone. A recording shows you your tells, but it cannot surprise you. You know the question, you wrote the follow-up, and you brace for both. The real room does not work that way. The interviewer asks the thing you did not plan for, and that unscripted moment is where most answers come apart. The second gap is the score. Watching yourself back, you forgive your own delivery, because you know what you meant. You cannot rate how you came across from inside your own head, and even the systems built to rate it stand on shaky ground, with a 2025 editorial in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment still calling automated scoring an open question rather than settled science (International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 2025). So aim to be defensibly good on camera, because that holds up whether a person or a model watches first.

That gap, an unscripted follow-up and an outside read on your delivery, is the exact hole Warmup left and never filled. A live two-way AI interview practice mock is built to close it. It holds a real voice-and-camera conversation and asks the follow-up you did not prepare for. Then it scores how you came across, all of it practice-only, with nothing recorded for or shared with an employer. Run the free drill yourself first this week, then use the mock the week before the interview to find what your own camera missed.