Frequently Asked Questions

Hot Seat is an AI-powered oral examination and preparation platform for iOS. It simulates the pressure of a real oral exam, tutoring session, or legal deposition through live voice conversation with an AI. You speak your answers out loud — the AI responds, questions, scores, and adapts in real time.

An account is required to use Hot Seat. This allows us to securely proxy your AI requests (no API keys are ever exposed on your device), and to save your session history if you're on the Pro plan. Sign-up takes about 30 seconds directly in the app.

Hot Seat is currently available on iOS (iPhone). It requires iOS 16.0 or later. The app is optimized for iPhone — iPad support is planned for a future release.

Load your content (PDF upload, paste text, or enable AI Knowledge Mode with a topic), select your session mode (Oral Exam, Tutoring, or Legal), configure your settings, then tap "Start Session." On the session screen, press the microphone button once. The AI will immediately introduce itself and ask its first question. You speak your answer — the session runs entirely through your voice from there.

AI Knowledge Mode lets you start a session without uploading any document. Simply type a topic — "Constitutional Law," "Cell Biology," "Machine Learning" — and the AI draws from its own comprehensive training knowledge to examine or tutor you on that subject. It's ideal when you want broad coverage or don't have a specific document to work from.

In Oral Exam and Legal modes, if you don't begin speaking within 5 seconds of the AI finishing its question, the AI will prompt you with a single firm sentence to answer. If you remain silent again, the AI will transition to a new topic entirely. In Tutoring mode, the silence handling is gentler — you'll receive an encouraging prompt to take a moment and try your best.

Yes. If our standard PDF text extractor can't read your document (which happens with scanned files), the app automatically falls back to GPT-4o Vision OCR — the pages are rendered as images and processed by the AI for text extraction. You'll see a "Attempting Vision OCR..." notification. This handles virtually all PDF formats including scanned legal documents and image-heavy textbooks.

Hot Seat uses OpenAI's premium TTS voices: Alloy, Echo, Fable, Onyx, Nova, and Shimmer. These are high-fidelity, natural-sounding AI voices — not the robotic system voices you may be used to from other apps. You can change the voice at any time from the session header. If the OpenAI TTS service is unavailable, the app falls back to your device's native system voice.

This is intentional — it's called mic gating. When the AI is speaking, the app suppresses transcript processing to prevent the AI from picking up its own voice and treating it as your response. After the AI finishes speaking, there's a 1.5-second cooldown before the mic starts processing your speech again. This ensures a clean, accurate turn-taking experience.

Hot Seat is designed as a voice-first experience — speaking your answers aloud is a core part of the training value. However, you can disable TTS in Settings if you prefer to read the AI's questions silently. Full text-only mode is not currently supported, as the live speech-to-text transcription is central to how sessions operate.

Deception Analysis is a behavioral indicator tool designed for training and preparation — not a lie detector. It scores your language against five verbal patterns that forensic linguistics research associates with deceptive testimony: timing anomalies, filler word density, distancing language, non-contractions, and protest language. No universal deception indicator exists — anxiety, stress, communication style, and individual baselines all affect these markers. Use the scores to identify patterns in your speech and practice cleaner, more confident testimony. Do not use these scores as evidence of actual dishonesty.

Yes — this is one of the primary use cases for Legal Mode. Upload the relevant case documents and run your witness through a simulated cross-examination to identify weak spots in their testimony before opposing counsel does. Hot Seat is a preparation tool only and does not provide legal advice. Always consult qualified legal counsel for actual legal strategy.

No. Hot Seat does not record or store your audio. Your speech is streamed to Deepgram's real-time transcription API and converted to text. Neither Hot Seat nor Deepgram retains your audio after transcription. Only the resulting text transcript is ever processed or stored (on Pro plans, session transcripts are saved to your account in Firestore for session history access).

Yes. All AI requests (OpenAI, Deepgram) are routed through our Firebase Cloud Functions backend. Your API keys are never stored on or transmitted from your device — they live exclusively in our server environment. Every request is authenticated with a Firebase ID token tied to your account, so no request can be made without a valid authenticated session.

The text extracted from your documents is sent to OpenAI's API (via our secure backend) as part of the session prompt so the AI can generate relevant questions. OpenAI processes this under their data handling policies. We do not share your document content with any other third party. For sensitive documents (legal, medical, financial), please review OpenAI's API privacy policy before uploading. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Tap the Pro upgrade prompt in the app (it appears when you try to access a Pro feature or from the home screen) and select your plan. Subscriptions are processed through Apple's App Store — billing is handled entirely by Apple and can be managed in your iPhone's Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions.

Yes, at any time. Go to Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions → Hot Seat → Cancel Subscription. You'll retain Pro access until the end of your current billing period. We do not offer refunds for partial billing periods, but Apple's standard refund policies apply.

We're working on an educational pricing program. If you're a student or academic institution interested in bulk licensing, contact us at support@hotseatprep.com and we'll work with you directly.