24 AUG 2026
Questions and answers
Fifty questions, each with one answer. The answers that do not help us are written at the same length and in the same voice as the answers that do, because an honest answer set stops working the moment one of them is shrunk.
What it is
What is Tingvar?
Tingvar is a live audio room where two to four AI personas argue with you, and with each other, about what is wrong with your plan. You write the plan first. The personas read it before the room opens, and they differ in what they optimise for rather than in what they know. Each one carries a deliberate blind spot the others can attack. It runs in a browser, and your voice stops whoever is speaking.
Does this just agree with me the way ChatGPT does?
No, Tingvar is built to attack the framing of your plan rather than to be helpful inside it, which is the failure a single assistant has by design. Post-training alignment optimises assistants for helpfulness and user satisfaction, so a model validates your framing and then solves the problem inside it. Three personas with opposed objective functions disagree with each other, and that disagreement is the signal. Our target for agreement-only turns is under 5 % of agent turns. It is a target, not a measurement.
Is this an AI meeting assistant?
Tingvar is not an AI chatbot, an AI assistant, a meeting assistant, a note-taker, a summariser, a copilot or an autonomous agent platform. Its output is an argument rather than a record of one. A meeting assistant sits in a meeting you were already having and writes down what happened. Tingvar is the meeting, and nobody in it is on your side by default. If what you need is a transcript of a real conversation with real colleagues, this is the wrong product.
Why would I want an AI to argue with me?
Tingvar's personas attack the proposal and never the proposer, and the useful signal is their disagreement with each other rather than their criticism of you. If a finance persona and a growth persona reach opposite conclusions from the same plan, the assumption they price differently is the one carrying the plan's weight. Every session ends with one question you answer yourself: name one thing you now believe about this proposal that you did not believe an hour ago. An empty answer is a failed session.
Who is this for?
Tingvar is built for someone about to commit to a decision that is expensive to reverse, such as a founder before a raise or a board meeting. The three launch use cases are a pitch rehearsal, a board or exec rehearsal, and a written plan you want put under opposed priorities. It is a poor fit for casual brainstorming, because the personas arrive hostile to a specific document and there is nothing for them to attack without one.
What are the personas, and are they just different prompts?
Tingvar has four personas, Victor Vance, Dr Elena Rostova, Marcus Thorne and Priya Raman, and they differ in what they optimise for rather than in what they know. Victor optimises for cash survival, Elena for whether the system holds under load, Marcus for distribution and switching costs, and Priya for whether the team can ship it. Each one is given a deliberate blind spot the others can attack, which is what stops any single persona reading as the oracle. All four are published on the personas page.
Why voice, and wouldn't text be easier to read?
Tingvar uses voice because interruption is the primary steering control, and interruption is native only in speech. In text you wait for a paragraph to finish. In a room you cut in the moment a persona goes wrong, and it stops. Spoken debate is also faster than text and forces brevity on the personas. You still get the record: a live transcript labels every line with the name of whoever said it, and it is exportable.
What do I actually get at the end?
A Tingvar session ends with a full transcript, every line attributed to the persona who said it, and one question you have to answer yourself. The question is: name one thing you now believe about this proposal that you did not believe an hour ago. The transcript is exportable on every tier. A written post-session brief is a v1.5 item and does not ship today. There is no verdict and no decision memo, because the argument is the output.
How it works
Can I interrupt it?
Yes, speaking is how you steer a Tingvar session, and your voice stops whichever persona is talking rather than queueing behind it. Human speech preempts everything in the room, and that is an invariant of the design rather than a setting you switch on. Speaking is also how you change the subject, ask a persona to defend a claim, or stop a line of argument that is going nowhere. The client leg of barge-in is not yet measured, and we publish measurements rather than targets.
Will they talk over each other?
Exactly one persona holds the floor in a Tingvar room at any moment, and the room decides who holds it rather than each persona deciding for itself. Server-side voice activity detection is deliberately switched off, so no persona ever decides on its own to speak. Without that, three personas answer every human utterance at once and the room is noise. The floor is held for a bounded period and released, and it can be taken from whoever has it.
How fast does it respond?
Tingvar's measured voice-to-voice latency is p50 1471 ms and p95 1986 ms, from 122 readings over 200 utterances taken on 19 August 2026. p99 is 2156 ms. Voice-to-voice means from you finishing a sentence to the first persona's audio starting. The readings were taken against Vertex AI in us-central1 with a real media server. More than half of that time is the model generating speech, and the stage by stage breakdown is on the evidence page. It is not instant.
How will I know who is speaking?
Each Tingvar persona has a distinct synthesised voice and a fixed position in the stereo field, and a live transcript labels every line with who said it. Separating voices across the stereo field makes rapid speaker changes easier to follow and easier to attribute afterwards. A mono fallback exists, because a single earbud or a laptop speaker makes panning useless. Four personas is the ceiling for the same reason: past four, a listener stops being able to attribute what was just said.
How many AI personas are in the room?
Three personas is the default in a Tingvar session and four is the ceiling, because past four a listener stops being able to attribute what was just said. The default three are Victor Vance, Dr Elena Rostova and Marcus Thorne. Priya Raman is the optional fourth, and she is the one to add when the question is whether the team can actually ship the thing rather than whether the plan is right. There is no setting that puts eight voices in a room.
Do I have to prepare anything?
Yes, Tingvar asks for a written brief before the room opens, and sessions that start from a written proposal are markedly better than cold starts. The brief is the proposal you want put under pressure: what you are proposing, what it costs, what you are assuming and what would make it fail. It is a document the personas have already read when they arrive. The cold start comparison is our own observation from internal testing, not a measurement.
How long is a session?
A Tingvar session is 45 minutes by default, and that is the unit everything on the pricing page is quoted in. You can leave a room early. Nothing keeps running after you go, and a session you end early still produces the transcript up to that point. Ending your first session inside the first five minutes is also how you claim the Pitch-Ready guarantee.
Do I need headphones, and where am I supposed to do this?
Tingvar needs headphones and a room where you can talk out loud for 45 minutes, because it is a spoken conversation and you will be interrupting people. Open plan is the honest problem here, and we do not have a good answer for it beyond a closed room or a quiet hour. A mono fallback exists for a single earbud, though you lose the stereo separation that makes speakers easier to tell apart. This is a hypothesis rather than something we have watched people do.
Cost and billing
What does one session cost me?
Tingvar is priced by the plan rather than by the session, and a session is 45 minutes with three personas. Professional is 149 USD a month for ten sessions and Team is 399 USD a month for thirty, both capped, so the monthly figure is the largest amount you can be charged in a month. There is no overage and no credit system to convert into money. An Enterprise tier is priced with you.
Is there a free tier?
Tingvar does not have a free tier, and there are two paid plans instead. Professional is 149 USD a month and Team is 399 USD a month, with an Enterprise tier priced with you. What we offer in place of a free tier is the Pitch-Ready guarantee: start your first session, and if five minutes in you do not feel cross-examined, end it inside that window and we refund the payment in full.
What happens when my plan's sessions run out?
Tingvar plans stop at their included allowance rather than charging past it. Both plans are capped rather than metered, so the monthly figure on the pricing page is the largest amount you can be charged in a month. There is no overage and no silent upgrade. A plan that quietly bills past its own ceiling is a trick rather than a business model. Your transcripts stay available and exportable.
What happens if the room drops halfway through?
If a Tingvar session drops for a reason on our side you are not charged for it, and the transcript up to that point is kept and exportable. A dropped room shows in your billing history as a session that was not charged, so you can check rather than take our word for it. Nothing about a dropped room is silently absorbed into your allowance.
Can I get surprised by an overage charge?
No, a Tingvar plan either stops at its included allowance or charges a published per-session rate you have already seen, and there is no third behaviour. Which of the two applies to your plan is stated in the same viewport as the price, not in a footnote and not in the terms. The reason we write this down is that metered pricing in this category produces the same complaint every time, which is a bill nobody could have predicted from the pricing page.
How do I cancel?
You cancel Tingvar yourself on the web in three clicks or fewer from your account settings, with no retention interstitial and nobody to talk to first. The control is at the account cancel page and it is linked from account settings. Your plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and your transcripts stay exportable until you delete them. Deleting your account cancels the subscription at the same time, and the account page says so before you confirm rather than after.
Can I get a refund?
Tingvar refunds your first payment in full if you end your first session inside the first five minutes. That is the Pitch-Ready guarantee, and you trigger it from your account without explaining yourself. Carry the session past five minutes and it is not refundable, because by then you have the argument, the transcript and the export. Your statutory withdrawal right in the UK and the EU is separate, is not limited to five minutes, and is not ours to remove.
Privacy and your data
What happens to my recording?
Tingvar does not store your session audio: it is processed while the room is live and no recording of it is kept. What persists is the transcript, the text of what you said and what each persona said, attributed line by line. Only the account that ran the session can read that transcript, and nobody at Tingvar reads one without your written request on a support case. You can delete any session yourself, and deletions are purged from backups within 30 days. The retention schedule is published at tingvar.com/trust/your-data.
Who can hear my strategic weaknesses?
Nobody else joins a Tingvar room: the participants are you and the AI personas, and the audio is not stored for anyone to play back later. The transcript is the part that persists, and it reaches our model vendor as part of the personas' context. Every vendor that touches customer data is named on the sub-processors page, including the model vendor. Who at Tingvar can read a transcript, and in what circumstances, is stated at tingvar.com/trust/your-data.
Is my data used to train AI models?
No, Tingvar does not use your brief, your transcript or your audio to train models. Google, which runs the model, states that customer data submitted to Vertex AI is not used to train or fine-tune its models without permission, that cached content is held for up to 24 hours in the data centre serving the request, and that prompts may be logged for abuse detection unless an exception is agreed. It is linked from our sub-processors page so you can check it.
Who are your sub-processors?
Tingvar publishes every vendor that touches customer data at tingvar.com/subprocessors, including the model vendor, with the jurisdiction each one operates in. The list names the underlying cloud for any vendor that is itself reselling infrastructure, because a list that stops at the reseller tells a reviewer nothing. We give 30 days' notice before a new sub-processor begins processing customer data, and you can subscribe to changes. The page carries an effective date, so you can tell how current it is.
Where is my data stored?
Your Tingvar session audio and transcripts are processed in the United States, in Google Cloud's us-central1 region, and we do not currently offer an EU-only processing region. For customers in the UK and the EEA, that means a transfer out of your region. We rely on Standard Contractual Clauses and the safeguards in our DPA. If your procurement requires EU data residency, the honest answer today is that we cannot meet it, and we would rather you knew that before you bought than after.
How do I delete a session?
You delete a Tingvar session yourself from the session list, and deleting your account destroys every session in it. Deletion is self-service and does not go through support. Anything you delete is purged from backups within 30 days, and we publish that number because an unbounded backup window is what fails a security questionnaire. Billing records survive deletion for seven years, because tax law requires it, and we say so rather than implying everything vanishes.
I am going to describe things about my company that are not public. Should I?
A Tingvar session is a spoken record of what is wrong with your plan, which makes it one of the most sensitive artefacts your company could produce. So the honest advice is to read our data page before your first session rather than after it. What we control is where it goes, who can reach it and how fast you can destroy it, and all three are published. Names, unreleased figures and anything under an agreement with somebody else are worth redacting from the brief.
Will it invent numbers about my business?
A Tingvar persona once turned the misheard phrase "turns in" into a confident objection about 15 % monthly churn that had never been said. We publish this because a room whose value is pressure-testing your numbers, and which invents numbers, is worse than no room at all. The personas argue from the brief you write and from what you say, and they cannot see your accounts or anything you have not told them. If a number sounds wrong, say so out loud.
Platforms and requirements
Is there a web version?
Yes, Tingvar runs in a browser with nothing to install, and that is the primary way to use it. You need a current browser with WebRTC and Web Audio support, a working microphone, and a connection that can hold a voice call. The browser asks for microphone permission when you join a room, and not before. Everything the product does in v1 is available in the browser, so nothing is held back for an app you have to download.
Is there an iPhone or Android app?
Tingvar does not have an iOS or Android app on the stores today, and the browser version runs on both platforms in the meantime. Both apps are planned and both are P0 on our own list. We do not publish a store badge for a listing that does not exist, and we do not publish a design render dressed as a screenshot. The iOS and Android pages state what is true today, and you can ask to be told when either one ships.
What do I need to run it?
Tingvar needs a current browser with WebRTC and Web Audio support, a working microphone, and a connection that can hold a voice call. Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on their current versions all carry what it needs. Headphones are worth having, because a laptop speaker feeding back into a laptop microphone is a reliable way to make any voice product unpleasant. A poor connection costs you audio quality first.
Can I use it from a coding agent or an automation?
Tingvar exposes an MCP server, so an agent you already run can convene a room from where your proposal already lives. Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf and Zed all speak MCP. The connection details, the authentication and an exact list of what exists today against what is still roadmap are on the MCP page, written in the tense each one deserves. A room convened this way is the same room you would join from a browser.
Can I use it with a screen reader, or without hearing the audio?
Tingvar targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA on the website, and the live transcript in the room is the media alternative for anyone who cannot use the audio. Known gaps are listed by name on the accessibility page with the date each one was found, rather than summarised as a commitment to inclusion. The product itself is a spoken argument, and we will not pretend that a transcript makes it equivalent for a deaf user. There is a route to report a barrier and a stated response time.
How it compares
How is Tingvar different from ChatGPT?
Tingvar and ChatGPT solve different problems: ChatGPT gives you one assistant optimised to be helpful, and Tingvar gives you three personas optimised to disagree with each other. You can interrupt a Tingvar room out loud and the personas can interrupt each other, which a chat window does not do because there is nothing to interrupt. Most people who use Tingvar will keep using ChatGPT, and for most of what they do that is the right choice. The comparison page states where each one wins.
How is this different from three ChatGPT tabs?
Three ChatGPT tabs give you three answers, and a Tingvar room gives you an argument, because separate tabs cannot hear each other. Nothing in tab two knows what tab one said unless you paste it there yourself, and by then you have chosen which criticism survives. Inside one chat window the instruction to be critical decays after two or three turns. In a room, one persona attacks another persona's reasoning while you listen, and you can cut in the moment either of them goes wrong.
How is Tingvar different from AI Group Call?
AI Group Call runs on iPhone and Android only, and Tingvar runs in a browser with nothing to install. Both are live voice products with more than one AI participant, which makes this the closest comparison in the category. AI Group Call meters by the minute, and Tingvar prices by the 45-minute session. Tingvar publishes a measured voice-to-voice latency figure with its method and its date. The full comparison, with the crawl date on every fact, is on the comparison page.
How is Tingvar different from AskVerdict?
AskVerdict's product is text and Tingvar's is speech, so their personas cannot interrupt each other and you cannot interrupt them, because there is nothing to interrupt. Where they are ahead of us, stated here rather than left for you to find: AskVerdict ships an API, an SDK and a command line tool, and publishes seven case studies. We have none of those. What we have is a spoken room you can cut into and a measured latency figure.
Could we build this ourselves with CrewAI or LangGraph?
You could build multi-agent text debate in an afternoon, and the hard part of Tingvar is none of that. The hard part is deciding which of three simultaneously willing speakers gets the floor, fast enough that the room still sounds like a conversation, without any of them talking over the human. Agent level turn-taking, where each agent decides for itself whether to speak, stops working at three agents. Our arbiter is a room level policy, and it is where the latency budget is spent.
What is Tingvar bad at?
Tingvar is bad at anything you want agreement or output from: it will not draft your deck, write your code, or summarise your meeting. It is a poor fit for casual brainstorming, for a decision you have already made, and for anyone who wants their instinct confirmed. It has no published customer outcomes, because zero real human sessions have taken place. The evidence page carries what we have measured and what we have not, including the rows that are empty.
Enterprise and security
Do you have SOC 2 or ISO 27001?
No, Tingvar holds no SOC 2 report and no ISO 27001 certificate, and we will not claim a stage of either one that we have not reached. No product in the set we crawled on 23 August 2026 publishes one either. What we do have is published: the controls on the security page, a pre-signed DPA you can read in full without a form, and every sub-processor named including the model vendor. We answer a security questionnaire in five business days.
Do you have a DPA?
Yes, Tingvar publishes a pre-signed data processing agreement at tingvar.com/dpa that your legal team can read in full before speaking to anybody here. It carries the sub-processor list by reference, the 30 day change notice, and the transfer mechanism we rely on for customers outside the United States. There is no form in front of it and no call required. A signed file follows once the four outstanding entity details are supplied. If your own paper has to be used, the demo page is the route.
Can we get single sign-on?
No, Tingvar does not have single sign-on today, and the enterprise scaffolding it belongs to has not been built. Single sign-on, tenancy controls and audit export are on the roadmap in the future tense, each with the state it is in, the date it was last reviewed, and no delivery date. We would rather you learned that here than on a call three weeks into a procurement. If it is a hard requirement, tell us on the demo form and we will say honestly where it sits.
What is your uptime commitment?
Tingvar does not publish an uptime percentage, because we have no operating history to base one on. A number invented before the service has run is not a commitment, it is a guess with a percentage sign on it. There is no status page yet: operational notices and incident updates go out through support, and a status page is scheduled for general availability rather than for launch. When we have enough operating history to write a service level agreement we can keep, we will publish it and date it.
Who is behind this company?
Tingvar is built by a registered company founded by Omotayo Aina, and the entity name, company number and registered address are on the about page. The same identity block sits in the footer of every page, so you never have to open a policy document to find out who you are dealing with. There is a named human, a contact route and a stated response time.
Where we actually are
Do you have any customers?
Tingvar has no customers, no testimonials and no case studies, because zero real human sessions have taken place. Every measured turn so far used pre-rendered audio, which means we have measured the machine and not the conversation. There is no logo wall on this site, no counter and no invented outcome figure, and there will not be one until there is something real to put in it. We will publish the first real session in full, with consent, when it happens.
Has anyone actually used this?
Zero real human sessions have taken place. Every measured turn to date used pre-rendered audio clips rather than a live human. What is built and verified is the decision layer: the turn-taking policy, the bid scoring and the configuration guards, with 619 automated tests passing and 81.78 % combined coverage. Everything there says the system works. Nothing there says anyone wants it, and being first is a real risk you are taking.
What have you actually measured?
Tingvar has measured voice-to-voice latency and the automated test suite, and has measured nothing at all about whether a session changes anyone's mind. The measured figures are p50 1471 ms and p95 1986 ms voice-to-voice, from 122 readings over 200 utterances on 19 August 2026, and 619 automated tests passing at 81.78 % combined coverage. The three numbers that would tell you whether it does its job have targets and no measured values, and those rows are left visibly empty on the evidence page rather than removed.
Something here is wrong or missing
Every answer above is one node in a register, and the same node is what the machine readable copy of this page carries. If an answer is wrong, write to corrections@tingvar.com. We correct it within 1 business day and log the correction publicly.