The interview is about your work, not your English
Where Spanish shows through
None of what follows is a sign of poor English. They are the places where two grammars disagree and Spanish, being the one you think in, wins. In writing you catch them. In the fourth minute of an interview, while you are also deciding whether to mention the migration or the incident, you do not.
Seven words that mean something else
False friends are ordinary in any pair of languages. What makes them expensive here is that Spanish and English share so much Latin vocabulary that the ones which diverged are precisely the ones you never stop to check — and several of them sit directly on the words an interview is made of.
pretend / pretender
The costly one. “I pretend to move into a lead role” is meant as pretendo, I intend to. It is heard as: I am putting it on. Say “I intend to” or “I want to”.
realise / realizar
“I realised the migration” means you became aware of it. Realizar is to carry out. In an interview this quietly deletes the largest thing you did. Use “ran”, “carried out”, “delivered”.
assist / asistir
“I assisted four conferences” reads as helping at them, not attending. And in the opposite direction, when an interviewer says a colleague assisted you, they mean help, not attendance.
career / carrera
“I finished my career in 2019” is a sentence about a degree that sounds like a sentence about retirement. English wants “degree”. Carrera as a working life exists too, which is what makes it slip.
compromise / compromiso
“I made a compromise with the client” is meant as a commitment and heard as a concession. If you are describing a promise you kept, say “commitment”.
sensible, actually
Sensible means sensitive; English “sensible” means level-headed. Actualmente means currently; English “actually” corrects the person who just spoke, which is not what you wanted in minute two.
The answer with nobody in it
This is the one that costs real offers, and it is not a mistake at all. Spanish has an elegant impersonal: se decidió migrar, se hizo un rediseño, se consiguió bajar la latencia. It is good style. It is modest. It carries no subject.
Translated honestly it becomes the English passive: “it was decided to migrate”, “a redesign was done”, “latency was brought down”. An English-speaking interviewer is listening for one thing in a behavioural answer — which of those verbs was yours — and the sentence has been built so that the information is not in it. The same instinct produces the other half of the pattern: nosotros as the default subject, because claiming a result alone feels like bad manners in most Spanish-speaking workplaces and often is.
What they hear
“Se logró reducir el tiempo de despliegue” → “deployment time was reduced”. Correct English, and it answers a question nobody asked. The interviewer writes down: could not say what he did.
What closes the gap
Name yourself for the verb, then hand the credit back: “I rewrote the pipeline; two colleagues reviewed it with me.” Saying “I” once is not arrogance in this room. It is the answer.
Questions that are harder than their words
Interview English runs on idiom, and the words in these are all words you know, which is why they do not register as things to decode. Each one is a request for a specific shape of answer.
“Walk me through it” — not a summary
A request for sequence: what you found, what you tried, what happened, in order. Answering with a conclusion sounds evasive. Answering with context first, point last, the normal Spanish ordering, uses the time before you reach the point.
“What was the ask?” — a noun, unexpectedly
Business English turns verbs into nouns: the ask, the lift, the spend. It means: what were you actually requested to deliver, as opposed to what you ended up doing.
“Who ran point on that?” — who was responsible
Nothing to do with points or scores. If the answer was you, this is the moment the impersonal costs you the most.
“Did you push back?” — and it is not a trap
They want to know whether you disagreed with a decision and said so. In many Spanish-speaking workplaces describing that about a manager is impolite. Here, answering “no, I followed the decision” is usually the weaker answer.
What Cue is doing while the question is still being asked
Trippi Cue is a Chrome extension. You click its icon in the tab your interview is running in, and from that moment Chrome hands that one tab’s audio to it — the sound the call is already playing to you. Your microphone is never requested. Nothing joins the call and no participant appears.
Two things then appear on your screen. First, the line as it was recognised, and under it the same line in the language you picked from the 68 in the window — Spanish out of the box, with the pair chosen by two buttons in the header rather than a settings page. Set both to the same language and that part stops. Second, when the copilot judges that a question was actually asked of you, a short card: not a script, a structure to speak from, written in whichever language you read fastest. The line the card grew from stays on the card, so you can check it answered the thing that was said.
Before the call you can type a short note about it — the role, the company, the one project you want to come back to. That is the difference between a general answer and one about your work. There is a field for your own question too, so “what did she just mean by the ask” is something you can put into the window mid-call.
What it does not fix
Your accent, and it does not need fixing
Nobody competent is grading you on it. What recognition does struggle with is names, acronyms and product nouns, in every language — which is why the original line stays on screen beside the reading.
The sentence you have to say
The card is written where you can read it fastest. Saying it out loud in English stays yours, and a card read out word for word sounds like a card read out word for word.
Being right about your own work
A language model writes the card from the last minutes of the call and your note. It can be confidently wrong about your stack and your history. Read it before you use it.
It also runs only in the browser: Google Meet, Zoom on the web, Microsoft Teams on the web. If the round is booked into a desktop client, an extension cannot hear it. There is no recording, no summary and no notes afterwards — the recognised lines and the answers are kept for 30 days and then deleted, and the audio is never stored at all.
FAQ
This language, specifically.
Will it write the answers in Spanish or in English?+
Whichever you choose, and the two are set separately. The interviewer is recognised in English, the line under it is shown in Spanish if that is what you picked, and the card can be written in Spanish so you read it at full speed — or in English if you would rather have the phrasing in front of you. Both are two buttons in the window header, changeable mid-call.
Does it correct my grammar while I speak?+
No, and that is deliberate. Cue never hears your microphone, so it does not know what you said — it hears the tab, which is the other side of the conversation. It helps with understanding the question and structuring the answer, not with policing your English.
I keep missing questions when the interviewer speaks quickly. Does this help?+
That is the case it is built for. The recognised line stays on screen after the sentence has gone, so a question lost to speed or to a bad connection can be read rather than guessed at, and you can ask for a repeat knowing exactly which part you missed.
Can it stop me saying things like “I pretend to” or “I realised the migration”?+
Not directly, since it does not listen to you. What it can do is put good English in front of you: the card is written in idiomatic English when you set the answer language to English, which is where most people notice the phrasing they were reaching for.
Is my Spanish accent a problem for the recognition?+
Speech recognition handles Spanish-accented English routinely. Where it slips is the same place it slips for everyone — surnames, product names and acronyms. The original line sits next to the reading precisely so a mangled word is visible rather than mysterious.
Let the round be about your work.
Trippi Cue is in the Chrome Web Store. The interviewer arrives in your language, and your answer is written in the one you pick.