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Elevate Your Debate Skills Faster

Practice Effectively. Get insights. Sharpen Your Critical Thinking with an AI debate coach built by world‑class debaters and educators.

Symbai is your AI‑powered debate coach

Designed To Reflect The Structure Of Real Competitive Debating.

Built for students, it helps you practice both sides of a motion, sharpen rebuttal, and prepare independently — all in a structured, competitive format.

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Designed by World-Class Educators

More about Connor

More about Sharuka

Symbai is built by world-class educators with deep competitive debating and teaching experience at the highest international levels.

Our leadership team has:

  • Won national championships.
  • Coached national debate squads.
  • Judged major Australasian and World Universities tournaments.
  • Supported students from across the globe.

The team brings together practical coaching experience, pedagogical expertise, and cutting-edge AI design to build tools that genuinely improve critical thinking.

Want live coaching too?
Connor and Sharuka will soon be running small-group and live debate sessions supported by Symbai.
→ Learn about Symbai Debate Coaching

Built for Every Debater — From Beginners to Champions

Symbai guides you through structured cases, rigorous rebuttals, and targeted feedback without the scheduling headaches or screen fatigue of Zoom coaching.

Unlike generic “debate-bots” that just react to your arguments, Symbai uses a unique debatetree structure to map ideas and provide genuine inspiration for rebuttals — the nuanced clash work that even experienced coaches find hardest to teach.

This structured format enables rich, context-aware AI feedback that simply isn’t possible in a basic chat interface.

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Mooting Prep for your Debate Team

How Symbai Works

1

Choose A Topic

Tell our AI what you are studying and it will create a structured debating activity suitable for your level around it.


2

Debate!

Debate our specially trained AI in a drag-and-drop canvas with a helpful debating toolkit and AI coach at hand.

3

Review & Grow

Identify ways to improve your critical thinking based on performance data and AI feedback.

Symbai was created by debate coaches for debaters — to help you overcome the challenges every speaker faces.

Case Construction

Case Construction → Enhanced with Symbai

Without Symbai

  • You often draft cases in bullet-point form that feel shallow or repetitive.
  • Strong exemplars are hard to find, so it’s difficult to know what a “perfect” case actually looks like.
  • Your cases can end up scattered across multiple pages, making it hard to see the big picture or build a clear strategy.

With Symbai

  • You can build cases visually, using editable AI-generated drafts that you can shape to fit your argument style.
  • Symbai’s ‘debatetree’ visual format makes shallow arguments obvious and helps you expand ideas with a drag-and-drop toolkit.
  • Argument types and icons guide you to think strategically.
  • A ‘request rebuttal’ tool lets them stress-test cases with AI-generated rebuttals.
  • The AI tutor gives instant feedback on structure and content.
Result - Build smarter, stronger cases—faster.”
Rebuttal & Clash

Rebuttal & Clash → Enhanced with Symbai

Without Symbai

  • Rebuttal practice is near impossible to do alone — it’s often limited to debate club sessions or coach feedback.
  • It is easy to default to shallow rebuttals (“That’s not true”) instead of thinking strategically.
  • It’s difficult to see how your individual rebuttals connect to broader points of clash in a debate round.
  •  

With Symbai

  • You can practise rebuttals anytime against the AI opponent, refining your responses at your own pace.
  • Symbai’s Rebuttal Toolkit helps you build strategic, layered arguments — not just quick denials.
  • The visual debatetree structure shows how your rebuttals interact with the opponent’s points, helping you recognise clash and strengthen overall case structure.
  • You can rapidly prepare rebuttals before a tournament, so you enter each round sharper and more confident
 
 
 
Result - Get more clash reps than in live-only training.
Delivery & Style

Delivery & Style → Enhanced with Symbai

Without Symbai

  • You rely too heavily on your notes, leading to poor eye contact and weaker audience engagement.
  • You get lost mid-speech, unsure where you’re up to or what point comes next.
  • Your delivery feels flat or rushed, without the clear signposting judges look for.

With Symbai

You can use your own debate mindmaps (called ‘debatetrees’) to plan and deliver speeches with greater confidence and control. The ‘debatetree’ structure:

  • Helps you keep your notes concise and easy to follow while speaking.
  • Uses visual icons and connectors to quickly remind you of key ideas mid-speech.
  • Encourages smooth, confident signposting as you move between arguments.
Result - You stay present and persuasive, focusing on delivery and impact—not scrambling through notes

Give Yourself the Competitive Edge — Free for 7 Days

Sharpen your arguments, refine your delivery, and track your progress — all at a fraction of the cost of private coaching.


Start your 7-day free trial today — no commitment, no setup required.

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What others are saying

“I believe Symbai has the potential through its unique multi-AI approach to become ubiquitous in the field of critical thinking in the way that Grammarly is associated with writing or Quizlet is with flash cards.”

 

 

Nick Hanne 
Education Partnerships Manager at the Free Speech Union NZ

“Symbai fills a major gap in education — it equips students to think logically, independently, and critically. Unlike other tools, it offers a neutral, AI-driven platform where students can genuinely practise debating and refine their thinking. It’s like having a 24/7 mentor that challenges without bias. A powerful solution for those seeking depth over group think in today’s education landscape.”


Todd Roughton 
Former Principal, HSNZ

The Two Most Effective Ways to Improve Critical Thinking

Unified in Symbai

Debating

Hundreds of thousands of students across 60 countries choose to spend their free time in formal debating competitions because it improves their critical thinking skills. 

Formal debating improves:

  • Dynamic reasoning — adapting ideas under pressure

  • Strategic thought — anticipating and countering objections

  • Cognitive discipline — structuring arguments with clarity and purpose

Increases Critical Thinking By Up To 50%

Competitive debate produces greater critical thinking improvement than argumentation courses.
Allen et al. measured the improvement using the Watson–Glaser critical-thinking test — a gold-standard assessment of inference, deduction, and evaluation skills.”
Source

8.6% Critical Thinking Gains In Just 3 Weeks

Students who participated in debate competition showed statistically significant improvements in critical thinking scores after just three weeks.
An 8.6% improvement in critical thinking is the cognitive equivalent of dropping your resting heart rate from 70 to 64 BPM. That's not learning facts or techniques — that's developing lasting cognitive fitness.
Source

9 in 10 former debaters go on to earn at least one advanced degree.

Of 703 National Debate Tournament alumni, over 90% held a graduate or professional degree, and many held multiple advanced degrees.
Of the 703 former NDT debaters; 40% earned master’s degrees (MA, MSc, MBA, MEd, etc.), 20% earned doctoral degrees (PhD, MD, EdD) and many held multiple advanced or professional degrees.
Source
Argument Mapping

Argument mapping has been around for hundreds of years, used by philosophers, scientists, and modern critical-thinking educators to make critical thinking clearer by drawing it out.
 And for good reason: when done well, argument mapping is one of the most effective ways to improve critical thinking and develop sharper logical reasoning.

Argument mapping helps you:

  • Clarify reasoning by revealing the actual structure of your thinking
  • Expose weak links that get lost in normal prose
  • Build precision through visual logic rather than persuasive writing tricks
A simple argument map diagram showing a “Main Claim” at the top supported by a “Reason” and “Evidence,” along with an “Objection” connected to a counter-reason, illustrating the structure of logical argumentation.

Improves Critical Thinking Courses By Over 300%

Critical thinking courses that used argument mapping software saw students improve their critical thinking over 300% more than similar critical thinking courses.
Compared a standard logic class to one using argument mapping software. The mapping group made dramatically greater gains on a standardized critical thinking test, far exceeding typical semester improvements.
Source

One Semester Of Argument Mapping Produces 6-7x MORE Critical Thinking Gains Than One Semester Of Normal University Study

Semester-long CT courses using digital argument mapping consistently produced effect sizes of 0.7-0.85 on standardized critical thinking tests. By comparison, a typical university semester yields just 0.11
Source

9% Critical Thinking Gains In Just Weeks

Five weeks of an argument mapping-led course resulted in an average critical thinking gain of 9%
These gains were achieved with minimal explicit critical thinking teaching. The gains came from interactions with other students within argument mapping software.
Source

 

Debating develops the habits that critical thinking courses try to teach:

  • Dynamic reasoning — adapting ideas under pressure

  • Strategic thought — anticipating and countering objections

  • Cognitive discipline — structuring arguments with clarity and purpose

Increases Critical Thinking By Up To 50%

Competitive debate produces greater critical thinking improvement than argumentation courses.
Allen et al. measured the improvement using the Watson–Glaser critical-thinking test — a gold-standard assessment of inference, deduction, and evaluation skills.”
Source

8.6% Critical Thinking Gains In Just 3 Weeks

Students who participated in debate competition showed statistically significant improvements in critical thinking scores after just three weeks.
An 8.6% improvement in critical thinking is the cognitive equivalent of dropping your resting heart rate from 70 to 64 BPM. That's not learning facts or techniques — that's developing lasting cognitive fitness.
Source

9 in 10 former debaters go on to earn at least one advanced degree.

Of 703 National Debate Tournament alumni, over 90% held a graduate or professional degree, and many held multiple advanced degrees.
Of the 703 former NDT debaters; 40% earned master’s degrees (MA, MSc, MBA, MEd, etc.), 20% earned doctoral degrees (PhD, MD, EdD) and many held multiple advanced or professional degrees.
Source

If debating is the clash of ideas, argument mapping is the architecture that makes clear thinking possible.
 It’s the practice of breaking critical thinking into smaller parts — claims, evidence, objections, and assumptions — and arranging them so the logic becomes visible.

Argument mapping has been around for hundreds of years, used by philosophers, scientists, and modern critical-thinking educators to make critical thinking clearer by drawing it out.
 And for good reason: when done well, argument mapping is one of the most effective ways to improve critical thinking and develop sharper logical reasoning.

Argument mapping helps you:

  • Clarify reasoning by revealing the actual structure of your thinking

     

  • Expose weak links that get lost in normal prose

     

  • Build precision through visual logic rather than persuasive writing tricks

     

These benefits make it a powerful method for anyone looking to enhance critical thinking skills, improve decision-making, or analyze arguments more effectively.

But traditional argument mapping has limits:

  • Pen and paper mapping is slow and quickly becomes cluttered
  • Digital mapping tools speed things up but remain static
  • And because the map never talks back, even skilled thinkers can hit writer’s block when faced with a silent diagram