VivaVoice: Rehearse Your Viva Out Loud

Final-year students must defend their projects in a viva, and job seekers face interviews. Both tests are spoken, yet almost everyone prepares by reading. Mock vivas need a lecturer's time, and generic bots ask textbook questions unrelated to your work. VivaVoice is a real-time voice examiner for your own material. Drop in your report PDF (the abstract, methods and results are extracted in the browser) or paste a job description, choose a supportive or strict examiner, and start talking. Questions come from what you submitted, and vague answers get a follow-up built on your exact words, like a real panel. While you speak, the agent calls client-side tools: show_question puts the question on screen and record_score fills a five-criterion rubric with evidence and a tip. VivaVoice also coaches delivery: speaking pace, filler words and thinking time. Ramble too long and the examiner cuts in and asks for your main point. At the end you get a report with a mark, a radar chart, priorities to fix and your weakest question answered two ways: what you said next to a model 5/5 answer. Sessions are saved so you can track progress and drill your weakest area. Everything runs on one AssemblyAI Voice Agent API WebSocket, configured per student: keyterms extracted from the report so jargon like YOLOv8n and NCNN is transcribed correctly, a transcription_prompt, "thinking time" turn detection, barge-in, tool results timed to reply.done, automatic session.resume after a network drop, and a wrap-up before the session cap. A zero-dependency Node server mints short-lived tokens, so the API key never reaches the browser. MIT licensed, 42 tests.