Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Italian live captions and productivity tool for conferences & events

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🎤Keynotes and main stage talks

From a far seat in a keynote hall at MiCo in Milan or a venue in Rome, the speaker is distant and the Italian is fast. Point Captio AI toward the nearest PA speaker and read every word of the keynote from any seat.

🔬Academic and research conferences

At an academic conference — a research congress at a Milan university or a scientific meeting in Bologna — presenters speak quickly and pack talks with terminology. Captio AI captions in real time and transcribes for later review.

💼Industry and professional events

Industry events, design and fashion summits, and product launches in Milan or Turin carry content that affects your work. Captio AI captions every speaker so you follow the panel.

📋Workshops and breakout sessions

In a workshop or breakout, several voices contribute in Italian from around the table. Place Captio AI on the table and follow every contribution, including from the back of the room.

🤝Networking and informal sessions

The most useful conversations often happen over espresso and at the conference dinner. Captio AI works in these noisy, informal settings the same way it does in the main hall.

🌍International and multilingual events

At an international conference, sessions switch between Italian and English. Live Translator captions foreign-language talks in real time so you follow the full programme.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Italian
95.5%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

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Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

Built for the room where you cannot ask anyone to repeat

Live captions from any seat

Point the phone toward the nearest PA output or speaker. Captio AI captions whoever is presenting in real time — from the front row or the back of a large conference hall.

Works without venue infrastructure

No hearing loop, no captioning service, no advance booking required. Captio AI works independently via microphone — whether or not the venue has provided any accessibility infrastructure.

Covers what official captioning does not

Official captioning, where it exists, typically covers the main stage only. Q&A sessions, workshops, breakouts, and networking are usually left uncaptioned. Captio AI covers all of it.

Record and review after

Record any session and upload it to Audio Transcription for a full written record. Use AI Summary to extract key takeaways — useful for dense technical content you want to process at your own pace.

60+ languages

For international conferences, foreign-language keynotes, or multilingual panels. Live Translator captions and translates in real time across 60+ languages with no manual switching between speakers.

Works for networking too

The conversations in hallways and at lunch matter as much as the sessions. Captio AI works in any setting — informal, noisy, unstructured — the same way it works in the main hall.

Italian

Why Italian is hard to understand

Consonant gemination

  • Doubled consonants that change the word
  • Italian contrasts single and doubled (geminate) consonants — 'nono' and 'nonno', 'copia' and 'coppia' — and the difference is how long the consonant is held, which also shortens the vowel before it. This is a timing distinction, not a lip shape, so from a distant stage a deaf attendee cannot see which of two terms was said.

Fast connected speech

  • Vowels and words that run together at pace
  • Italian words end in vowels and chain into one another, and a confident keynote speaker delivers at speed. The vowel-to-vowel linking blurs word boundaries, so a deaf attendee watching the mouth sees a continuous flow with no clear seams between words.

Syntactic doubling

  • Words that double the next consonant across a boundary
  • In central and southern Italian, certain words trigger gemination of the first consonant of the following word (raddoppiamento). The change happens across a word boundary, invisibly, so the same word can look different depending on what precedes it — another timing effect a lip-reader cannot catch.

Regional varieties

  • Milan, Rome, and Naples colour the podium
  • An Italian conference draws speakers whose Italian carries northern, Roman, or southern colouring — different vowel qualities, intonation, and degrees of gemination. A deaf attendee calibrated to standard northern Italian meets shifting speech from one presenter to the next.

Italian–English code-switching

  • Technical English inside Italian sentences
  • Italian academic and industry talks drop English terms into Italian sentences constantly, especially in technology, design, and finance. A deaf attendee lip-reading Italian meets English phonology on the key vocabulary, then returns to Italian, with no visual signal of the switch.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and professional access in Italy

Out of nearly 59 million people in Italy, an estimated 3.5 million live with some form of hearing loss, and academic surveys put the prevalence of prelingual profound hearing loss at around 0.72 per 1,000, with markedly higher rates in parts of the south. Italy recognised Italian Sign Language (LIS) in law only in 2021, and even now a large professional population — the researchers, designers, and specialists who fill the country's conference audiences — lives and works with hearing loss.

Italy hosts a major calendar of congresses and events — the academic conferences of Milan, Bologna, and Rome, the design and industry summits at venues like MiCo in Milan, the trade fairs of Turin. These run on spoken Italian delivered over PA systems, with English woven into technical sessions. Real-time Italian captioning of keynotes, panels, and Q&A is rarely provided, and where captioning exists it covers the main stage, not the breakouts and networking where professional value is built.

Captio AI closes that gap. Point the phone toward the PA and read every Italian keynote and panel answer from any seat, record a dense session for the full transcript, and follow the conversations over an espresso — so a deaf professional in Milan or Rome gets the same value from the same conference as everyone in the hall.

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Privacy

What you hear stays with you.

Gone the moment it ends

Captio AI processes your audio in real time and discards it immediately. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is kept.

Not a product

Your conversations are not something Captio AI sells, shares, or monetizes — to anyone, for any reason.

Not used to train anything

What you say in a doctor's appointment or a job interview never ends up in a training dataset. Not ours. Not anyone else's.

100% PRIVATE

Private by default

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Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Italian keynotes chain the vowels together and the doubled consonants decide the word, none of which I can see from the back. Captio AI captioned the talk from my seat and I recorded it for the transcript. I followed a full congress session for the first time."

Marco B. 🇮🇹
marco.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Milan — academic researcher

"Design talks in Milan and Rome drop English terms into Italian on every point. Captio AI captioned both from my seat without me switching anything. I read the whole session and knew exactly what the launch meant for my studio."

Giulia R. 🇮🇹
giulia.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Rome — design conference attendee

"Speakers came from Milan, Rome, and Naples, all colouring the Italian differently. Captio AI captioned every one and the audience questions from the floor. As a panellist I answered what was actually asked instead of guessing."

Alessandro F. 🇮🇹
alessandro.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Turin — panellist

"Networking over espresso is where the useful conversations happen, and it used to be the part I stepped away from. Captio AI captioned the informal chats at the reception so I could take part. That is where I met my first investor."

Francesca M. 🇮🇹
francesca.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Milan — startup founder

"Italian keynotes chain the vowels together and the doubled consonants decide the word, none of which I can see from the back. Captio AI captioned the talk from my seat and I recorded it for the transcript. I followed a full congress session for the first time."

Marco B. 🇮🇹
marco.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Milan — academic researcher

"Design talks in Milan and Rome drop English terms into Italian on every point. Captio AI captioned both from my seat without me switching anything. I read the whole session and knew exactly what the launch meant for my studio."

Giulia R. 🇮🇹
giulia.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Rome — design conference attendee

"Speakers came from Milan, Rome, and Naples, all colouring the Italian differently. Captio AI captioned every one and the audience questions from the floor. As a panellist I answered what was actually asked instead of guessing."

Alessandro F. 🇮🇹
alessandro.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Turin — panellist

"Networking over espresso is where the useful conversations happen, and it used to be the part I stepped away from. Captio AI captioned the informal chats at the reception so I could take part. That is where I met my first investor."

Francesca M. 🇮🇹
francesca.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Milan — startup founder

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every speaker in Italian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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