What's New in ASQ Better

ASQ Better has always had a simple premise: you get better at asking questions by asking them out loud, under time pressure, without a script in front of you. The core drill hasn't changed. But until now, the app could only tell you how fast you asked — it had no idea what you actually said.

That changes with this release. ASQ Better now listens to your questions, scores them, and tells you where you're losing points.

The app now hears you

Every question you ask in a session is captured from your microphone and transcribed. Nothing is scored on speed alone anymore — the actual words you spoke are recorded, saved, and shown back to you.

This is the foundation for everything else below. It's also the single biggest change to what the app is: ASQ Better went from a stopwatch to a coach.

Real scoring, on four dimensions

Your questions are now scored on four things, not one:

• Speed — how quickly you got the question out. Hesitation is a habit, and it's a costly one.
• Form — length and structure. Long questions are worse questions. The scoring rewards the short, clean ask.
• Specificity — whether your question actually engages with the topic in front of you, or floats free of it.
• Fluency — filler, false starts, restarts, and the audible sound of a mind still assembling its sentence.

Each question gets a score across all four. Topic and session averages are computed as means, so a ten-topic session and a three-topic session are directly comparable — your numbers measure your performance, not your endurance.

A recap after every topic

When you finish a topic, you now see what you actually said — the transcript of each question, side by side with its score. This is the part that tends to be uncomfortable and useful in roughly equal measure. Most people are surprised by the gap between the question they meant to ask and the question that came out of their mouth.

One line of coaching per session

At the end of a session, ASQ Better identifies your weakest category — normalized, so it isn't just flagging whichever category happens to be scored out of the most points — and gives you a single, specific thing to work on next time.

Not a dashboard. Not a report. One line. The goal is that you leave with one thing in your head, not twelve.

Choose your session length

You can now run a 3, 5, or 10 topic session. Three for a quick warm-up before a deposition or an interview; ten when you want to actually work.

Previously the session length was fixed. It no longer is.

Pick your microphone

ASQ Better now detects the microphones available on your machine and lets you choose the one you want to use. Your choice is remembered between sessions.

If you've ever had an app confidently record from the wrong device, you'll appreciate why this matters.

Fresh topics, every day

The topic pool now refreshes itself daily from current news headlines, and older topics are pruned automatically. The topics you're handed should feel like they were written this week — because they were.

Why any of this matters

The skill ASQ Better trains is narrow and unglamorous: ask a short, clear, open question, and then stop talking. Almost nobody does this well under pressure. Lawyers stack three questions into one and hand the witness a choice of which to answer. Journalists deliver a paragraph of context and then trail off without ever asking anything. Podcasters answer their own question in the same breath they ask it.

You cannot fix any of that from memory. You have to see it. That's what this release is for: it puts the transcript in front of you, points at the specific habit that's costing you, and gives you another topic.

Go run a session.