Audio Only in an AI Interview Is a Request, Not a Setting

Can You Turn the Camera Off?

Not on most one-way video interviews, because there the camera is the recording. The platform captures your answer as video, and there is no audio-only mode sitting behind a settings menu waiting to be found. What varies is the format the employer chose before the link was sent, and changing that is a conversation with a person rather than a toggle you can flip. The platform in your invitation decides how much of this applies.

The camera being on does not always mean the camera is being scored.

What a candidate says is all its AI relies on, according to HireVue's 2025 explainability statement. The same document reports no video analysis and no other audio characteristics, and no assessment of facial expressions, body language, background and surroundings, or tone of voice ¹.

That is one vendor describing its own product, not an audit.

It also does not mean the video goes unwatched. The recording exists, a recruiter can play it, and that statement is scoped to HireVue's AI-scored interviews rather than to every platform an employer might send you. Another vendor's system may read the picture, and some say so in their own candidate notices. The place that answers it for your interview is the notice attached to the invitation you were sent.

So there usually isn't a toggle, and the useful question sits one step over: what format did this employer choose, and will they change it.

Which Refusal Are You Actually Making?

Two different asks get merged whenever this comes up. One is declining to be captured on video. The other is declining to have an AI evaluate the recording, which leaves the video in place and changes who reads it. They go to different places, they have different answers, and only the second is a documented choice on a major platform's consent screen. The first runs through an accommodation request or a question to the recruiter.

HireVue's statement describes that route. Candidates are shown an AI consent statement before an AI-scored assessment, and can opt in or out of AI evaluation ². A candidate who opts out completes the same assessment, but recruiters manually review and rate the answers against the same behaviorally anchored rating scales ². The consent statement is required to tell the candidate that opting out will not exclude them from the hiring process ². That is a route through the process, not out of it.

Consent screens are configurable by the employer, so what you are offered may not match the vendor's example.

For a role based in Illinois, this has been statute rather than a vendor's policy since 2020. The Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act says an employer may not use artificial intelligence to evaluate applicants who have not consented to AI analysis ³. Read what the Act does not carry, too: the compiled sections contain no penalty, no enforcement agency and no private right of action ³.

Other Illinois law may reach the same facts, and the Act does not require an employer to keep considering you.

Which rules reach you depends on where the job sits. What rights you have before an AI interview, state by state lists the places that already require notice or consent, and the date each one started. Most places still require none of it. Whether declining an AI interview keeps you in the running covers the decision this section stops short of.

Where Camera-Free Interviews Already Exist

They exist, and they belong to vendors an employer picks before you ever apply. Sapia.ai's candidate explainer describes its chat interview as five to seven text-based questions, with no video recording and no camera, assessed on the written answers alone ⁴. It is not timed, and the page says candidates are not penalized for how long they take ⁴.

Alex, the AI interviewer formerly named Apriora, says it runs a personalized first-round interview by phone call, video or text, at a time the candidate picks ⁵.

Both descriptions come from the vendors themselves, and neither page is an audit.

Neither says how the answers are scored or who reads the transcript. Sapia's claim that no sensitive characteristic feeds its model describes the inputs, not the outputs ⁴.

None of that helps if the invitation in your inbox is for a different platform. You do not choose the vendor, and a camera-free format at one company is not an option at another. What the existence of these formats gives you is a reasonable thing to ask for: a written or phone alternative for this stage, which some employers already run as their standard first round. The ask is specific, which is what makes it answerable.

Asking for something that exists somewhere is a smaller request than asking for an exception.

Ask the Recruiter, in One Sentence

Name the barrier and the format you need, and send it before the deadline rather than after it. Before a HireVue AI-scored interview, the vendor's sample instructions screen carries a Request Accommodations button for a qualified disability, wording an employer can alter. The statement says an accommodation request goes to the relevant department of the employer managing the hiring process, and the employer decides ⁶.

Clicking the button starts a request. The vendor says the decision that follows sits with the employer and outside its control.

Ask what changes as well as what is relaxed.

On that platform the button relaxes time limits, and the sample wording says the game-based section will not then be presented, because of its strict time requirements ⁶. So the relaxed version is a different assessment from the timed one. The same question is worth putting to any alternative format an employer offers.

There is one published reason an employer may want the camera on, and it is worth knowing before you write.

Mandiant's September 2024 guidance on North Korean IT workers tells employers to require cameras during interviews, so appearance can be matched to online profiles ⁷.

It also tells them to check that the interviewee matches the identification provided, and lists reluctance to engage in video communication among the behaviors it saw ⁷.

That is a security vendor's recommendation list drawn from its own incident work, not a rule you are judged against. It does not weigh the ordinary reasons a person declines video: bandwidth, a shared room, a disability, a housemate asleep behind you. But it explains why a bare refusal can be read differently from a named barrier and a specific request.

The employer-side guidance on the same worry is blunter than the security advice. What a hiring team is told to do when it doubts who is on the call tells them not to study the video for tells. It puts identity checks at hire instead, for everyone.

One sentence does the job. "The video format is a barrier for me because of a disability; is a written or phone alternative available" names the obstacle, gives the reason an employer needs, and stops.

If a disability is not what is behind it, ask without one. An employer can say no, and a question costs a sentence.

If a disability is behind the ask, there is more to get right than one sentence. How to ask for an accommodation on an AI interview covers the wording and the timing in more detail. And what employers are told about ADA accommodations on an AI assessment shows the same ground from the other chair, including what a process is supposed to offer before anybody asks.

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