Frequently asked questions.

Third Degree is a live voice AI that cross-examines you. You pick one of five adversarial scenarios — Deposition, Witness Stand, Job Interview, Sales Pitch, or Interrogation — load your own material, and answer out loud while the AI questions, pushes back, scores, and adapts in real time. It runs in your browser today; native iOS and Android apps are on the way.

An account is required to use Third Degree. This allows us to securely proxy your AI requests (no API keys are ever exposed on your device or browser), and to save your score reports and performance history if you're on the Pro plan — never recordings, never transcripts. Sign-up takes about 30 seconds directly in the Web App.

Third Degree is fully compatible with modern web browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge) on desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile devices — the web app is the full product, not a preview. Native iOS and Android apps are in development and coming soon, built from the same codebase with the same features.

Load your material (PDF upload or paste text), pick your scenario — Deposition, Witness Stand, Job Interview, Sales Pitch, or Interrogation — optionally tell the AI your role and context ("I am the defendant; question me about the night of March 15th"), then start the session. 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.

The AI treats silence the way a real questioner would. If you don't begin speaking within a few seconds of the question ending, it will prompt you with a single firm sentence to answer. Stay silent again and it moves on — and your composure scoring notices. Freezing up is one of the things Third Degree exists to train out of you.

Yes. If the standard PDF text extractor can't read your document (which happens with scanned files), the app automatically falls back to Vision OCR — the pages are rendered as images and processed for text extraction. This handles virtually all PDF formats, including scanned legal documents and image-heavy reports.

Each session can run up to 30 minutes, and your session time draws from your monthly pool — 150 minutes on Pro, 400 on Litigation. Splitting your preparation across multiple focused sessions consistently outperforms one marathon, so the minutes go further than they look. If you run short before your pool resets, top up at $0.30 per minute and keep going.

Third Degree ships six premium, high-fidelity conversational voices with natural human inflection — not robotic system voices. Pick one in Settings → AI Voice, or leave it on Auto and each scenario casts its own questioner: the opposing counsel doesn't sound like the hiring panel, and the interrogator sounds like neither.

Yes — and it can interrupt you. Third Degree runs full-duplex live voice: both sides can speak, react, and cut in at any moment, exactly like a real cross-examination. Talk over the AI mid-question and it hears you; ramble, and it may not wait for you to finish. Echo cancellation keeps the AI's own voice out of your mic, though headphones always give the cleanest experience in a loud room.

No — and that's the point. Answering out loud, under pressure, in real time is the entire training value; a text-only mode would be a different product. If you can't speak freely where you are, that's a good sign it's not the moment for a session.

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 answers. Do not use these scores as evidence of actual dishonesty.

Yes — this is one of the primary use cases for the Deposition and Witness Stand scenarios. 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. Third Degree is a preparation tool only and does not provide legal advice. Always consult qualified legal counsel for actual legal strategy.

The 3rd Degree is our grand-opening event: one challenge, identical for everyone on Earth — 60 to 150 seconds on the mic against a live AI, graded by an independent AI judge, ranked on a single worldwide leaderboard. The event rotates through the launch lineup: Shark Tank, Convince Me, Press Briefing from Hell, and the Casanova Contest. See how it works.

Yes — The 3rd Degree, its leaderboards, streaks, and XP are included on both the Pro and Litigation plans, with three scored attempts a day for subscribers. One scored attempt a day is free for everyone, no subscription required. And anyone can earn one bonus attempt a day by posting their run publicly with #ThirdDegreeChallenge and claiming it from the results screen. See Pricing for details.

No. Third Degree runs a zero-retention policy on session substance: we do not store your audio, and we do not store transcripts of what was said — on any plan. Your voice is processed in real time solely to run the live conversation, and our voice infrastructure is configured to retain basic call attributes only (no recordings, no transcripts). What we keep is numeric: your scores, progress graphs, and cue counts. The only session recording that can ever exist is the one you explicitly opt to create before a session — and that is captured on and saved to your own device. We never receive a copy, and no mechanism exists on our side to retrieve one.

Yes — on your terms. Before a session starts you'll be asked whether to keep a recording. Say yes, and the session audio (you on one channel, the AI on the other) plus a transcript save directly to your device when the session ends. In The 3rd Degree you can go further and have your device compose a ready-to-post vertical video clip of your run — captions, countdown, score reveal, and your camera if you opt in. Say no — the default — and nothing is recorded, anywhere, by anyone. Either way, our servers hold only your numbers.

Yes. All AI requests are routed securely through our private Cloud backend. Your connection and credentials live exclusively in our secure 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.

It powers your session, then it's gone from our side. Your material transits in real time — to our backend and directly to our AI model providers (no gateways, no resellers) — to generate questioning grounded in your facts. It is never written to our database; after the session we hold only a character count. Want even less exposure? Tap Anonymize before you start: your material is rewritten with names replaced by roles and identifiers stripped, you review and approve the rewrite, and only that version is used. See our Privacy Policy and Trust & Security for the full zero-retention commitment.

You can upgrade to Pro or Litigation directly through the Web App using our secure payment portal — billed monthly by card, managed any time inside Profile / Settings.

Yes, at any time. Go to Profile / Settings inside the Web App, and manage your billing settings to cancel. You'll retain Pro access until the end of your current billing period.

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

We are in an active Soft Launch phase. The full Third Degree experience — live voice, all five adversarial scenarios, deception analysis — is live and fully functional in modern web browsers on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Launching web-first lets us refine the audio pipelines and ship updates rapidly. The web app is the product, not a waiting room.

Yes, absolutely. Your Third Degree account is fully cross-platform. Your subscription and your score reports carry straight over to the native iOS and Android apps when they're released — one account, same plan, every device. What never syncs is session substance: recordings and transcripts exist only on your device, and only if you chose to keep them.

Native iOS and Android apps are in development, built from the same codebase as the web app so they ship with the identical feature set. We're not promising a date — they arrive when they're ready. In the meantime, nothing is held back: everything Third Degree does is live in your browser today, on the same Pro ($49/month, 150 minutes) and Litigation ($149/month, 400 minutes) plans — one account, same plan, every device.