Google Interview Warmup Is Gone: Free Alternatives for 2026

Google Interview Warmup was one of the few free tools that let you answer interview questions out loud and read back what you actually said. If you have tried to open it recently, you will have noticed it is gone. Here is what it did, what to look for in a replacement, and the free ways to keep practising, including if you are preparing for a technical interview.

A person explaining something with both hands at a meeting table, a laptop beside them

Is Google Interview Warmup still available?

No. As of October 2026, its addresses on Grow with Google no longer load the tool: they send you to the Grow with Google homepage or to a page-not-found message. We have not found an official Google replacement.

What it did, and why people miss it

Google launched Interview Warmup in May 2022 as part of Grow with Google. According to 9to5Google's launch coverage, it worked like this:

→ You answered out loud. It transcribed your answer in real time.
→ It pointed out patterns. Your most-used words, and the talking points you covered, such as skills, experience and lessons learned.
→ It never graded you. You could answer the same question as many times as you wanted.
→ It was free, with question sets for data analytics, e-commerce, IT support, project management, UX design, and a general set.

That combination is why it was popular: speaking, then seeing your own words on the screen, is the fastest way to notice that your "short" answer took three minutes and said "basically" eleven times. Note what it did not offer, though: there was no software engineering track, no follow-up questions, and no feedback on whether an answer was actually good.

What to look for in a replacement

Feature	Why it matters
You speak, not type	Typed answers hide the pauses, fillers and rambling that real interviews expose
A transcript you can reread	Most of the learning happens when you read back what you said
Follow-up questions	Real interviewers dig into your first answer; a script that never pushes back trains half the skill
Feedback on content	Word counts are useful; knowing whether you answered the question is more useful
For technical roles: code that runs	An answer that sounds right and fails on an edge case is still a wrong answer

Free alternatives

1. A voice assistant with the right prompt

Most general AI assistants now have a voice mode, and with a clear prompt they make a decent practice partner for behavioural questions. The prompt does most of the work. This one recreates what Warmup did and adds the follow-up questions it never asked:

📋 Copy this prompt

You are interviewing me for a [role] position. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my full answer. After each answer, ask one follow-up question that a real interviewer would ask. After every three questions, tell me: which answer was weakest and why, any words I repeated too often, and whether each answer named what I personally did. Do not praise answers that did not answer the question.

The limit is that a general assistant does not know your industry's bar unless you tell it, and it cannot run code.

2. Your phone's voice recorder

The low-tech version still works. Read a question, answer it out loud, then play it back or read the automatic transcript. It is uncomfortable, which is the point. Start with "tell me about yourself", because it is the answer most people have never actually heard themselves give.

3. A human peer, for free

Peer mock interviews put a real person on the other side. Pramp, the best-known free option, now runs as Aced Practice; here is what happened to Pramp and how a peer session works today.

4. For software engineers: tools built for technical rounds

Interview Warmup never covered coding or system design, so if that is your interview, a purpose-built tool is the better replacement. Transparency note: we build Devana.

✓ Devana: an AI interviewer that talks, asks follow-ups, and runs your code. Coding, system design and behavioural rounds, with three free interviews a month.
✓ interviewing.io: a free AI interviewer for coding and system design, and paid sessions with human engineers.
✓ HackerRank mock interviews: AI mock interviews across several technical round types. New, and we have not tested them.

For a side-by-side look at these and more, see the best AI and human mock interview tools in 2026, compared.

A 20-minute routine that replaces it

1. Five minutes: pick three questions you expect, and write one line per answer naming the point you want to land.
2. Ten minutes: answer all three out loud, recorded, with any of the options above.
3. Five minutes: read the transcripts. Did each answer land the point you wrote down? Mark the weakest one and answer it again tomorrow.

For behavioural questions in particular, this guide to behavioural answers beyond STAR covers what to put in the answer once you are comfortable saying it.

Frequently asked questions

Was Google Interview Warmup discontinued?

Its pages no longer load the tool as of October 2026, and we have found no Google announcement of a successor.

Is there an official Google replacement?

Not one we have found. A general AI assistant in voice mode, with a prompt like the one above, is the closest free substitute.

Did Interview Warmup work for software engineering interviews?

Only for the general and behavioural side. It had no software engineering track, no coding and no system design, so engineers used it mainly for "tell me about yourself" and past-experience questions.