Google Interview Warmup shut down. Here is what actually replaces it.

What happened

Google retired Interview Warmup in 2026. The tool now lives at an archived URL, and the Grow with Google page that used to host it has been replaced with a general article on preparing for interviews. Google's own suggested path forward is Gemini Live, plus Career Dreamer and custom Gemini Gems.

This matters more than a normal product sunset. Interview Warmup was free, required no account, and asked nothing of you beyond a microphone. For a lot of people it was the first time they had ever said an interview answer out loud and then read it back. That on-ramp is gone.

What Interview Warmup actually did

It is worth being precise about the thing you are replacing, because most 'alternative' lists are not.

Warmup gave you five questions in a fixed set, one at a time. You answered out loud. It transcribed you in real time, then showed your answer back with three kinds of highlight: the talking points you covered, the words you used most, and the job-related terms you reached for. That was the whole product.

Note what it did not do. It did not score you. It did not interrupt. It did not follow up on a vague answer, and it never pushed back. It was a mirror, not an opponent. That was the right design for a free warm-up tool and it is exactly why it worked as a first step.

Why Gemini Live is not a like-for-like swap

Gemini Live is a capable general-purpose voice assistant, and you can absolutely ask it to run a mock interview. But it is a general assistant being pointed at an interview, not an interview product.

There is no fixed five-question structure unless you build one. There is no transcript view designed around your answers. There is no equivalent of the talking-points or job-term highlighting, because that analysis was purpose-built. And the free tier is time-limited per day, so a long rehearsal can hit a wall mid-session.

If you want the Warmup experience specifically, a general chatbot will not reproduce it by default. You have to prompt it into shape every time, which is the friction Warmup existed to remove.

What to look for in a replacement

Before the list, a short checklist. Most people pick the wrong tool because they never decided which of these they needed.

Does it work by voice, or by typing? Reading a written answer is a different skill from saying it under pressure, and only one of them is what happens in the room.

Does it push back? A tool that accepts your first answer and moves on is testing your preparation. A tool that asks 'you said you led that — what did you personally do?' is testing your actual interview.

Does it give you something to act on? A transcript is evidence. A score with named weaknesses is a plan. Warmup gave you the first and not the second.

Is it free to start? Warmup's audience was people who could not or would not pay. Any replacement that opens with a credit card is not serving that group.

And the one nobody puts on the list: is it practice-only? Some tools in this category are built to feed you answers during a live interview. That is a different product with a different risk profile, and you should know which one you are signing up for.

The alternatives, honestly assessed

Gemini Live. Google's own recommendation. Free tier with a daily time limit. Genuinely good at conversation. Requires you to build the structure yourself and gives you no interview-specific analysis. Best if you already know what you want to drill and just need something to talk to.

AISIM. Voice-first, and built around the thing Warmup deliberately left out: pressure. The personas interrupt, challenge vague answers and follow up, and you get a scored Sim Report naming your weakest dimension. Free tier with no card. Practice-only by design — it will never assist during a live interview. Best if Warmup felt too gentle and you want the real temperature.

Huru. Straightforward B2C interview practice with a large question library and a browser extension that builds an interview from a job posting you are looking at. Paid after a trial. Best if you are applying at volume and want per-posting preparation.

Yoodli. Strong speech analytics — filler words, pacing, clarity — with a free tier that is limited to a small number of lifetime sessions. Note that the company has been steadily moving toward enterprise sales and L&D, so the consumer interview product is no longer the centre of the roadmap. Best if your problem is delivery rather than content.

Interviewing.io. Not a Warmup replacement in any meaningful sense, but worth knowing about. You get anonymous mock interviews with real senior engineers, priced per session in the hundreds of dollars. Best if you are targeting senior engineering roles and want a human signal, with a budget to match.

Your phone's voice recorder. Free, already installed, and better than nothing by a wide margin. Answer the question out loud, play it back, and listen for the moment you started rambling. No analysis, no structure, but it reproduces the single most useful part of Warmup: hearing yourself.

Which one to pick

If you want exactly what Warmup gave you and nothing more, use Gemini Live with a fixed prompt, or record yourself. Both are free and both give you the mirror.

If Warmup was useful but you got comfortable with it and your real interviews still go badly, the gap is pressure. A tool that never interrupts cannot prepare you for one that does.

If you are applying at volume across many postings, prioritise per-job question generation over realism.

And if you are being asked to pay before you have said a single answer out loud, keep looking. The whole reason Warmup mattered is that it let you start.

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