Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Russian 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 in Moscow or St Petersburg, the speaker is distant and the Russian 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 Moscow university or a scientific meeting in Novosibirsk — 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, forums, and product launches in Moscow or Kazan carry content that affects your work. Captio AI captions every speaker so you follow the panel and miss nothing professionally relevant.

📋Workshops and breakout sessions

In a workshop or breakout, several voices contribute in Russian 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 coffee and at the conference banquet. 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 Russian, English, and other languages. Live Translator captions foreign-language talks in real time so you follow the full programme.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Russian
93.8%

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.

Russian

Why Russian is hard to understand

Palatalization

  • Hard and soft consonants that look the same
  • Russian pairs almost every consonant with a palatalized 'soft' counterpart, and the contrast changes meaning. The tongue-body raising that softens a consonant is barely visible from the front. In a keynote delivered from a distant stage, a deaf attendee sees identical mouth shapes for soft and hard consonants that make different words.

Vowel reduction (akanye)

  • Unstressed o and a merge into one weak vowel
  • Russian reduces unstressed vowels heavily — unstressed 'o' and 'a' collapse into a single weak sound (akanye). Words look different from their written form, and at podium pace the reduced vowels give a lip-reader little to segment a long technical term by.

Consonant clusters

  • Dense clusters compressed at speed
  • Russian permits long consonant clusters — 'vzglyad', 'vstrecha' — that compress further in fast speech. In a rapid panel exchange, these clusters run together into a stream that offers almost no visual footing to a deaf attendee reading lips.

Mobile stress

  • Stress that jumps around the word
  • Russian stress is free and mobile — it moves between forms of the same word — and unstressed syllables reduce heavily. A deaf attendee trying to anchor a word by its stressed syllable finds the anchor shifts as the speaker inflects it through a technical argument.

Russian–English code-switching

  • Technical English inside Russian sentences
  • Russian academic and industry talks drop English terms into Russian sentences without pause — 'sdelali deploy', 'nash pipeline'. A deaf attendee lip-reading Russian suddenly meets English phonology on the key term, then returns to Russian, with no visual warning.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and professional access in Russia

Hearing loss is widespread but under-served in Russia. A national survey found a mean rate of self-reported hearing trouble of 22.2%, yet hearing-aid use is very low — unmet need in around 98% of cases of self-reported hearing difficulty. The Global Burden of Disease Study estimates about 9 million Russians aged 15 and over have disabling hearing loss, far above the roughly 643,000 recorded in official 2021 diagnoses, because national statistics do not systematically collect hearing-health data. A large professional population lives with hearing loss that the system barely counts.

Russia's conference and forum culture — the academic congresses of Moscow and St Petersburg, the industry forums and technology events of the major cities — runs on spoken Russian delivered over PA systems, with English woven into technical talks. Real-time Russian captioning of keynotes, panels, and Q&A is almost never provided, and where any accessibility exists it rarely reaches past the main stage to the breakouts and networking where professional value is built.

Captio AI closes that gap. Point the phone toward the PA and read every Russian keynote and panel answer from any seat, record a dense session for the full transcript, and follow the conversations over coffee — so a deaf professional in Moscow or St Petersburg 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

"The keynote was fast Russian from a distant stage, full of reduced vowels and clusters I cannot segment on the lips. Captio AI captioned it from my seat and I recorded the session. I followed a full congress talk for the first time without borrowing notes."

Dmitry K. 🇷🇺
dmitry.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Moscow — academic researcher

"Speakers drop English terms into Russian sentences on every technical point. Captio AI captioned both together without me switching anything. I read the whole forum session and understood exactly what the announcements meant for my field."

Olga S. 🇷🇺
olga.s***@gmail.com
Deaf, St Petersburg — industry forum attendee

"Russian panel Q&As move fast and the soft and hard consonants look identical to me. Captio AI captioned every answer as the mic went around. I stopped guessing and started reading exactly what was said."

Sergei V. 🇷🇺
sergei.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Kazan — product manager

"Networking over coffee is where the deals start, and it used to be where I gave up. Captio AI captioned the informal conversations at the reception so I could take part. That is where I found my first co-founder."

Anna M. 🇷🇺
anna.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Novosibirsk — startup founder

"The keynote was fast Russian from a distant stage, full of reduced vowels and clusters I cannot segment on the lips. Captio AI captioned it from my seat and I recorded the session. I followed a full congress talk for the first time without borrowing notes."

Dmitry K. 🇷🇺
dmitry.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Moscow — academic researcher

"Speakers drop English terms into Russian sentences on every technical point. Captio AI captioned both together without me switching anything. I read the whole forum session and understood exactly what the announcements meant for my field."

Olga S. 🇷🇺
olga.s***@gmail.com
Deaf, St Petersburg — industry forum attendee

"Russian panel Q&As move fast and the soft and hard consonants look identical to me. Captio AI captioned every answer as the mic went around. I stopped guessing and started reading exactly what was said."

Sergei V. 🇷🇺
sergei.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Kazan — product manager

"Networking over coffee is where the deals start, and it used to be where I gave up. Captio AI captioned the informal conversations at the reception so I could take part. That is where I found my first co-founder."

Anna M. 🇷🇺
anna.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Novosibirsk — startup founder

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every speaker in Russian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store