When Craqly’s desktop app first showed up in engineering forums in late 2024, the most common reaction wasn’t excitement. It was skepticism: “How is this not just cheating?” That’s a fair question, and I’ll get to it. But first it’s worth understanding how the technology actually works, because a lot of the ethical debate is happening without a clear picture of what these tools do and don’t do.
The four-step pipeline from your voice to an answer on screen
Every AI interview assistant, whether it’s Craqly, InterviewAssistant.ai, or anything else in this category, runs roughly the same pipeline. The differences are in execution speed and audio capture method, not the underlying architecture.
Step 1: Audio capture. The tool needs to hear the interviewer’s question. Browser-based tools capture tab audio from Zoom or Google Meet directly. Desktop applications like Craqly capture system audio at the OS level, which means they work on any platform, including phone calls bridged through your computer. The system-audio approach is more reliable but requires a native install.
Step 2: Speech-to-text transcription. The audio gets converted to text using an ASR (automatic speech recognition) model. Modern ASR engines, Whisper from OpenAI being the most widely deployed, run at close to real-time with around 95% accuracy on clear audio. Background noise, strong accents, and overlapping speech all degrade this.
Step 3: AI processing. The transcribed question, along with whatever context the tool has been given (your resume, job description, target company), gets sent to a language model. The model generates a suggested response, pulls in relevant facts, or both. This is the step that adds the most latency.
Step 4: Overlay display. The output renders on your screen in a window or overlay that your interviewer can’t see. The whole pipeline, from end of question to text on screen, typically runs between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds on a decent internet connection.
What 1.5 seconds actually feels like
That number sounds fast. In practice, 1.5 seconds is about the natural pause length before most people start answering a question. So a good user experience is one where the suggestion appears roughly when you’d start talking anyway. The bad experience is when there’s lag, you start talking before anything appears, and then you’re managing two streams of information at once.
The tools that work well in practice are the ones that surface structured prompts rather than full sentences. A bullet-point scaffold of “key things to mention” is more useful than a paragraph you’d have to read aloud while pretending to think. I’ve used both approaches and the scaffolding approach is easier to work with, though it requires you to actually know your subject matter underneath.
Is this cheating? Honest answer
This is where people’s opinions diverge sharply, and I think both sides have legitimate points.
The case that it’s not cheating: interviews are fundamentally a proxy for job performance. On the job, you’d Google things, ask colleagues, consult documentation. An interview that penalizes any assistance doesn’t test what you’ll actually do at work. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 found that 76% of professional developers now use AI tools regularly during their actual work. Banning AI from an interview while the job itself involves AI is an odd position.
The case that it is cheating: interviews are a two-way information exchange. The company is trying to assess your actual capabilities and how you think. If the tool is generating the substance of your answers, the company is hiring a version of you that doesn’t exist at the keyboard. That’s a real mismatch that leads to real problems after the hire.
My take, which you’re free to disagree with: the ethical use case is preparation and scaffolding, not real-time answer generation for questions you otherwise couldn’t answer. If the tool is helping you organize thoughts you have, that’s closer to using notes. If it’s generating knowledge you don’t have, that’s a different situation.
Browser extension vs. desktop app: practical tradeoffs
Browser extensions are easier to set up and don’t require installation permissions. The tradeoff is they only capture audio from the browser tab where your interview is happening, which means they break if the interviewer moves to a different platform or if you’re on a phone screen.
Desktop apps capture system audio universally, which is more reliable. The install requirement means IT security policies at some companies block them on company machines. If you’re interviewing from a personal machine, this doesn’t matter. If you’re at a company that locked down your laptop, it might.
Craqly runs as a desktop application with system-level audio capture, which is why it works across platforms. The install is straightforward on Mac and Windows. The tradeoff of a desktop approach is that any OS update that changes audio permissions can break functionality until a patch ships, which has happened with at least two major macOS releases in the past two years.
Getting started without breaking your prep routine
The candidates who seem to get the most out of these tools are the ones who use them for practice first. Run ten mock interviews with the AI assistant active. Figure out which types of questions the suggestions are actually useful for (usually behavioral and system design). Figure out which ones are noise (usually simple factual questions you already know cold).
Going into a real interview having only used the tool once is a recipe for distraction. The cognitive overhead of managing the overlay while also listening, thinking, and talking is non-trivial. You need to have practiced enough that the tool is peripheral, not central.
Whether you use one of these in a real interview is a decision that involves your own ethics, your read on the specific company’s culture, and how much you actually need the assistance. What seems clear is that these tools are improving fast enough that the conversation about them isn’t going away.