What's New: Party Mode, a Hands-Free Trivia Host That Plays on Your TV

Every trivia night has the same weak spot: somebody has to run it. One person reads the questions, watches the clock, keeps score, and never actually gets to play. On a road trip it is the passenger squinting at a phone. In a classroom it is the teacher. At a bar it is whoever lost the coin toss.

Party Mode takes that job. It is a voice host built into Trend Trivia that reads every question and every answer out loud, gives the room time to think, reveals the answer, and moves on to the next one without anyone touching the phone. Put it on a TV and you have a trivia board the whole room can read. It arrives in version 1.5.0 on iOS and Android as the app's fifteenth game mode, and the tenth in the Premium lineup.

What a round sounds like

You pick your settings, tap Start, and the host greets the room, says how many questions are coming and what the round is about, then gets going. Each question is read aloud, then the four options, A through D. The screen highlights whichever line is being spoken, so people who read faster than they listen are never lost. Then the answer window opens: a countdown bar drains, three soft beeps and a chime mark the last three seconds, and the correct answer turns green while the host reads it. A short beat, and the next question begins.

The voice is not a phone's built-in text-to-speech. Every question in the catalog has been recorded ahead of time with a studio-grade neural voice, so the read is smooth, the pronunciation is right, and nothing hitches mid-sentence while a phone tries to synthesize a word. You choose between a female voice and a male voice in the lobby, and you can tap either one to hear a preview before you commit.

Nothing about Party Mode is scored. There is no XP, no streak, no leaderboard entry, because nobody is tapping answers into the phone. It is a host, not a test. Which is exactly what you want when eight people are shouting answers at a television.

Put it on the TV

This is where Party Mode earns its name. Mirror or cast your phone to a TV (AirPlay on iPhone, Smart View or screen casting on Android, or a plain HDMI adapter) and Party Mode does something most apps do not: instead of showing a stretched copy of your phone screen with black bars down the sides, it draws a dedicated 16:9 board built for the big screen. Large question text that wraps cleanly, a two-by-two grid of answers, the countdown bar, a status line telling the room what to do, and the round progress up top. Gold highlight on the line being read, green on the reveal.

Your phone becomes the remote. While the TV shows the board, the phone shows bigger controls: Pause, Skip, Again, and when you are hosting at your own pace, Reveal and Next. A small green pill in the corner confirms the TV is connected. Unplug or disconnect mid-round and the board drops back to the phone without missing a question. Reconnect and the TV picks up where things are.

You can also lock the phone. The audio keeps playing, the round keeps stepping, and the lock screen shows a Now Playing card with the event name and the current question number, with pause and play right there. Take a call and the host waits, then picks back up when you hang up.

Quick setup presets

The lobby has a row of one-tap presets that configure everything below them. Every setting stays editable afterward, so a preset is a starting point, not a lock.

• Party. Mixed categories, a comfortable 12-second answer window, and questions that start easy and get harder so the room gets some early wins.
• Bar Trivia. The format bars actually use. Each question is read twice, answers are held until the end of the round so teams can write them down, and the host controls the pace with Reveal and Next.
• Classroom. Easy difficulty, a longer window, and the teacher sets the pace.
• Road Trip. Longer rounds, auto-play to the next round, and nothing that needs a screen. Toss the phone in the cup holder.
• Autopilot. Built for a bar TV that nobody is hosting. Twenty-question rounds with a 20-second window sized for people reading a screen across the room, a fresh category every round, a one-minute hold between rounds, and the download QR code on the board while it waits. Plug the phone in and walk away.

Every option in the lobby

If you would rather build the round yourself, here is what is there.

• Questions: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 50. The lobby shows a live estimate of how long the round will run. Fifty questions is close to half an hour of continuous hosting.
• Categories: pick any combination of the nine evergreen categories (Politics, Sports, Entertainment, Technology, Science, Geography, History, Art, Business), or leave them all unselected for a mixed round.
• Mix in Daily Challenge and Trending Now: sprinkle a few of this week's headline questions into the round.
• Difficulty: Any, Easy, Medium or Hard. With Any selected you can turn on Start easy, get harder.
• Voice: Female or Male, with a tap-to-preview.
• Answer window: 8, 12, 15, 20, 30, 45 or 60 seconds.
• Host voice on or off (off gives you a silent board that paces itself) and Game sounds on or off for the countdown beeps.
• I'll set the pace: replaces the timer with Reveal and Next buttons on the phone. The host decides when the room has had enough time.
• Answers at the end: the host reads all the questions first, then walks back through them with the answers. This is how written-sheet bar trivia works.
• Read each question twice: the question and options are read a second time after a short pause.
• Teams: 2 to 20 named teams. After each reveal, tap the teams that got it right and the tally updates on the phone and the TV. Adjust with minus and plus at the end of the round if the host needs to overrule. Team names are remembered for next time.
• Event name and a venue message (up to 80 characters). The event name goes on the TV title screen, over the board, and on the lock screen. The venue message shows as a gold pill on the TV between rounds, which is the right place for "Half-price wings until 9."
• Auto-play next round: a countdown on the round-over card starts the next round with the same settings.

Running a full night, not just a round

Real trivia nights are five or six rounds with things happening in between, so Party Mode has tools for the in-between too.

With teams on, totals carry from round to round. The round-over card shows standings with medals, and from round two onward each team gets a green up-arrow or red down-arrow showing how many places it moved. If the top two are tied, a Tiebreaker chip appears and the host draws one hard question, sudden-death style. A x2 next round chip doubles the value of every correct tally in the following round for a dramatic finish. And a Break chip pauses for 5, 10 or 15 minutes while the TV shows an intermission clock, the standings, and your venue message.

The game itself is saved to your account. If the phone dies, the app is force-closed, or you switch phones, the lobby shows a Resume card ("Round 3, Question 6 of 10, 4 teams") and picks up exactly where it stopped, tallies intact. Quitting mid-round to change a setting keeps the game too. Only New Game clears it.

No repeats

Party Mode keeps its own memory of which questions your account has heard, separate from the history that Solo Play and the Daily Challenge use. A question is never read to the same account twice while there are unheard questions left. If you exhaust a category, the host borrows unheard questions from other categories before it ever circles back. With thousands of recorded questions in the catalog, an Autopilot bar TV can run for roughly forty hours before it starts over, and the catalog grows every week with the Trending Now and Daily Challenge refreshes.

Who it is for

Party Mode is a Premium mode. It is included with the 7-day free trial and with a Premium subscription. Unlike the other nine Premium modes, it cannot be unlocked with a rewarded ad, since there is no single game to unlock; a Party Mode session is a whole evening. Everything in the free tier stays exactly as it was.

Version 1.5.0 is rolling out on the App Store and Google Play. Update, tap the Party Mode tile on the home screen, and let someone else do the hosting for once.

Hosting a night yourself instead? Our guide on how to host a trivia night covers formats, pacing and scoring, and Party Mode handles the reading.

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