One AI Desktop App for Interviews, Sales, and Meetings (Plus Pitches and Recruiting)
Craqly ships with five session modes: Interview, Sales, Pitch, Meeting/Notes, and Recruiting. That makes it an AI desktop app for interviews, sales, and meetings, plus two more conversation types nobody usually groups together. People ask us, reasonably, whether that is focus or the absence of it. Why not do one thing well?
This post is our actual answer. Every live conversation an AI assistant can help with runs on the same real-time machinery, and what changes between an interview and a sales call is context, not plumbing. Splitting that across five products means paying for the plumbing five times. There is more to it than that, including a tradeoff we accepted that specialist tools don’t have to.
The cost of owning a separate tool for every conversation
In 2022, a research team analyzed telemetry from 137 workers across three Fortune 500 companies and found they toggled between apps and websites just under 1,200 times a day. The reorientation cost added up to nearly four hours per week (HBR, 2022). That study looked at ordinary work apps. Conversation tools are a worse case, because the switching happens under pressure, minutes before a call starts.
The market has organized itself by conversation type. Gong built a large business on analyzing sales calls. Otter and Fireflies own meeting transcription (we compared that category in our Otter.ai alternatives roundup). A wave of interview copilots showed up through 2023 and 2024, most doing nothing else.
If you’re a founder who sells, hires, pitches, and occasionally interviews for advisory roles, the specialist logic says you should run four subscriptions with four onboarding flows, four billing dates, and four different ideas about where your transcripts live.
That isn’t hypothetical fragmentation. It’s four apps that each capture audio slightly differently, four permission prompts on macOS, and four places to check when you’re trying to remember what a specific person said three weeks ago. There’s a cognitive cost on top of the calendar cost, well documented: Gloria Mark and colleagues found people working through interruptions report significantly more stress and frustration (Mark et al., CHI 2008). Fumbling with tools in the two minutes before a live call is exactly that kind of interruption, self-inflicted.
What the five modes are
| Mode | Built for | What it does differently |
|---|---|---|
| Interview | Live job interviews on Zoom, Teams, Meet | Uses the global overlay for screen-share safety; surfaces answer prompts in real time |
| Sales | Discovery calls and demos | Keeps deal context in view while you talk |
| Pitch | Investor and client pitches | Oriented around Q&A, the part of a pitch you can’t rehearse |
| Meeting/Notes | Stand-ups, syncs, client meetings | Extracts action items instead of prompting you to speak |
| Recruiting | The interviewer side of the table | Structured for evaluating answers rather than producing them |
Why one AI desktop app for interviews, sales, and meetings?
Because every live conversation type needs the same underlying machinery: audio capture, real-time transcription, and an on-screen overlay that stays out of your way. Only the context and the output change from one conversation to the next. Build that stack once, swap a mode layer on top, and you get five products for roughly the cost of maintaining one.
Screen-share safety is a property of the overlay window itself, set once at the window level with macOS and Windows content protection, not something each mode reimplements. That’s why it holds regardless of which mode you’re in. We wrote a separate deep-dive on this: screen-share-safe interview tools.
The rest of the shared layer: 18 languages, real-time responses, and no bot joining your call. Craqly runs locally as a desktop app, so there’s no “Craqly Notetaker” participant announcing itself. We broke down the architecture difference in desktop AI assistant vs browser extension.
Where the modes actually diverge
Interview mode’s defining behavior is speed under scrutiny. You get a few seconds of acceptable silence after a question, and the prompts have to land inside that window. Sales mode’s defining behavior is memory. It holds deal context in front of you so you’re responding to this prospect and this objection, not a generic script.
Pitch mode exists because the pitch itself is the rehearsed part. The Q&A after it isn’t, and that’s where funding conversations get decided. Meeting/Notes mode flips the direction entirely. It listens and extracts action items so you can be in the conversation instead of transcribing it. Recruiting mode is the mirror image of Interview mode. Same call, opposite chair, opposite output.
The pricing follows the architecture. You don’t buy modes, you buy minutes. 1 credit equals 1 minute of live session, in any mode. The free Starter plan includes 20 credits, and Pro is $19/month for 180. A sales call on Wednesday and an interview on Friday draw from the same pool. You can try Craqly free with any of the five modes.
The tradeoff we accepted
Specialist tools will beat us on post-call depth for a while, maybe permanently. Gong’s analytics and coaching workflows represent years of work aimed at revenue teams with managers who live in dashboards. Otter’s meeting archive goes deeper than ours. We aren’t building either of those.
Here’s the uncomfortable version. Across the last 30 days, the average active Craqly user ran 1.26 distinct modes. Sixteen of nineteen used exactly one. The shared-infrastructure argument is sound on the engineering side, and so far most people are buying one tool that happens to have four others behind it. We think that changes as the modes mature. We don’t have proof yet.
I don’t know if the generalist bet holds past a certain team size. Somewhere between the solo founder and the 40-person org there’s a crossover point, and we haven’t found it yet. What we do know is that a fix to audio capture or overlay behavior lands in all five modes at once, which isn’t true for a company running five codebases.
Where this fits if you’re job hunting
Craqly is the live-conversation layer. It doesn’t write your resume or find you jobs. If you’re deep in a job search and want the full pipeline, prep, mock interviews, resume, search, and auto-apply, that’s what our sister product covers, and we’ve written up how the LastRoundAI system fits together.
The five-mode design comes down to a bet about what conversations have in common. If we’re right, the era of one tool per conversation type will look like the era of buying a separate camera, GPS, and music player. If we’re wrong, you’ll know soon enough, because the specialists will out-execute us mode by mode. Which conversation would you hand to a second brain first?
