Preparing for a viva has meant leaving your workspace, pasting chapters into a general chatbot, and getting back questions with no connection to what you actually wrote. Viva Prep does it inside Alfred Scholar, against the manuscript itself.

## What changed

- **One action in the manuscript editor.** Viva Prep sits in the checks bar of a draft manuscript, next to Guidelines, AI Writing Check, and Spelling. Run it and Alfred reads the whole manuscript.
- **Questions grouped the way a committee thinks.** Motivation and contribution, literature and positioning, methodology and design, results and analysis, limitations and validity, implications and future work. The same six themes every time, so a second run is comparable to the first.
- **Every answer names the section it came from.** Not a general answer about your field, but one drawn from your own writing, with the heading it rests on, so you can go and check it.
- **It says so when your manuscript does not answer a question.** The questions you cannot yet answer are the most useful thing on the list, and they are marked as such rather than filled in with something invented.
- **The result is a note, not a panel.** Viva Prep files the questions into a Viva Prep folder in your Second Brain, where you can annotate them, link them, and come back the week before the defence.
- **Running again refreshes the same note.** No duplicates piling up in your notebook. If you have edited the note yourself since the last run, Alfred asks before replacing it.

## Why

A viva is an oral defence of work you spent years on, and the preparation for it is mostly a matter of anticipating where someone will push. That is a question about your manuscript, not about your field in general, so the answers have to come from your manuscript. Everything here is traceable back to a section you wrote, because an answer you cannot locate in your own thesis is not an answer you can give in the room.

Viva Prep is available on the Pro and Lab plans.