Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

English live captions and productivity tool for communicating with deaf & hoh

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

👨‍👩‍👧Family conversations

A Sunday roast, a Christmas gathering, a call from a relative in a different part of the country. You speak at your natural pace — regional accent and all — and your deaf or hard of hearing family member reads every word in real time. Nobody has to slow down or repeat themselves.

💼As a hearing colleague

Open-plan offices, the kitchen queue, corridor conversations, a quick question at someone's desk. The ordinary exchanges that fill a British working day. You talk normally and Captio AI makes sure your deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows every word without either of you having to adapt.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner is deaf or hard of hearing and you are not. You speak naturally — whether that is RP, Yorkshire, or anything in between — and they read every word as you say it. No more typing messages on phones between you in the same room.

🏠Living together

Conversations across the hallway, questions from the kitchen, catching up over the evening news. Captio AI covers the ordinary low-stakes moments of shared home life — the ones that add up to connection over time without anyone having to work for it.

🤝Introducing someone new

A friend's housewarming, a new colleague joining the team, a neighbour you have not properly met. You set up Captio AI and the conversation starts without any awkward preamble about how to communicate or what to do differently.

👥Mixed group settings

The pub, a dinner party, a work social, a family gathering where some people are deaf or hard of hearing and some are not. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so nobody is left watching a conversation happen around them.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

English
93.5%

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

You talk. They follow. No adjustment needed.

You speak naturally

No slowing down, no special phrasing, no training required. Captio AI handles everything — you just talk the way you always do.

They read as you speak

Your words appear on their screen word by word while you are still talking. Not a summary after — the full sentence, in real time.

Works wherever you both are

Living rooms, offices, restaurants, social gatherings. No venue setup, no special conditions. Captio AI works anywhere you have a conversation.

No sign language from either side

You do not need to learn anything new. Neither do they. Captio AI bridges the gap without requiring any change to how either of you communicates.

Works with how you actually speak

Fast, accented, casual. Captio AI handles real speech — not just slow, clear dictation. You do not need to perform clarity for it to work.

Private by default

Your conversations are never recorded, stored, or shared. Audio is processed in real time and discarded immediately — nothing is kept.

English

Why English is hard to understand

Regional accent gap

  • 40 British accents. Each one a different lip-reading challenge.
  • The UK compresses more accent diversity into a smaller area than almost anywhere in the English-speaking world. For a deaf or hard of hearing person, a hearing family member's Geordie accent and a hearing colleague's Brummie accent are two entirely different lip-reading problems. A familiar accent is hard enough. An unfamiliar one is almost unreadable — and in most British households and workplaces, people speak in whichever accent they grew up with.

Low lip-visibility

  • Only 30–40% of English sounds are visible on the lips
  • Consonant pairs like /p/ and /b/, /f/ and /v/, /s/ and /z/ produce identical mouth shapes — lip-reading cannot separate them. In running natural speech, multiple sounds per sentence are acoustically distinct but visually identical. Even the most skilled lip-reader catches roughly half the words in continuous conversation and fills in the rest from context — which fails the moment the topic shifts or a new speaker joins.

Vowel reduction and elision

  • British English swallows its own syllables in casual speech
  • Casual spoken English — the kind used at home, in kitchens, across living rooms — reduces unstressed syllables heavily. 'Probably' becomes 'prob'ly'. 'Going to' becomes 'gonna'. 'Are you all right?' becomes 'y'alright?' The lip pattern a deaf person sees in everyday British speech between hearing people has almost no relationship to the written word. It takes sustained effort to decode.

Conversational speed

  • Hearing people speaking to each other talk faster than they realise
  • British conversational speech between people who know each other well — family dinners, colleague catch-ups, flat-share exchanges — is fast, overlapping, and full of backchannels. The speed hearing people use naturally with each other is not the speed they use when consciously addressing a deaf person. For a deaf or hard of hearing person trying to follow a natural exchange they were not specifically addressed in, the default pace is the barrier.

Indirect meaning

  • British understatement hides the actual meaning in the words you miss
  • British English carries significant meaning through intonation, understatement, and implication rather than explicit vocabulary. 'That's quite interesting' means disagreement. 'Not bad' means good. 'Could you possibly...' is a firm request. A deaf person who catches 70% of the words may still miss the actual meaning — because it was embedded in the remaining 30%, not stated directly.

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The Challenge

18 million people in the UK. Most of the gap happens at home.

In 2024, RNID updated the UK hearing loss figure from 12 million to 18 million — a 50% revision driven by the 2021–22 census and a broader definition that now includes people with milder loss and single-ear hearing loss who were previously uncounted. Around one in five people in the UK has some form of hearing loss. The majority are not profoundly deaf, do not use BSL, and are not served by formal accessibility infrastructure. They are navigating ordinary daily life with reduced hearing — at home, at work, in social settings — largely without support.

The BSL Act 2022 legally recognised British Sign Language as an official language of England, Scotland, and Wales. It was a landmark for the Deaf community — and it gave deaf people no new legal rights. The 'Locked Out' report, published in 2025 by the UK Government's BSL Advisory Board, found that the exclusion of deaf and deafblind BSL users from health and social care is 'entrenched and normalised as part of everyday life.' Repeated access failures cause what the report describes as 'accumulated trauma over a person's lifetime.' Legal recognition has not translated into practical access.

The communication gap is most acute not in formal settings but in ordinary ones. RNID's Health and Wellbeing Survey found that 62% of people with hearing loss report isolation or reduced confidence, and 87% say it affects their daily communication, work, and relationships. The people most likely to cause that isolation are not strangers — they are family members, partners, and colleagues speaking to each other at normal pace, without realising that the deaf or hard of hearing person beside them has stopped following.

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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

"My brother is deaf and I never figured out how to include him properly in fast group conversations. I just speak and he reads. The Brummie accent wasn't a problem at all — it just worked."

Dan W. 🇬🇧
dan.w***@gmail.com
Hearing, brother is deaf since birth, Birmingham

"My mum's hearing aids help but not enough when the whole family is talking over each other. Captio AI at Sunday dinner means she follows everything now, not just the bits aimed directly at her."

Fiona M. 🇬🇧
fiona.m***@gmail.com
Hearing, mother has progressive hearing loss, Edinburgh

"My colleague and I share a desk. Before, I was writing everything on paper or sending emails for things that should take ten seconds to say. Now I just talk and he glances at his phone. Normal working day."

James T. 🇬🇧
james.t***@gmail.com
Hearing, deaf colleague, open-plan office, Leeds

"My flatmate is hard of hearing and we used to default to typing even when we were in the same room. Captio AI fixed that — I speak and she reads. It made living together easier immediately."

Rachel O. 🇬🇧
rachel.o***@gmail.com
Hearing, hard of hearing flatmate, Bristol

"My brother is deaf and I never figured out how to include him properly in fast group conversations. I just speak and he reads. The Brummie accent wasn't a problem at all — it just worked."

Dan W. 🇬🇧
dan.w***@gmail.com
Hearing, brother is deaf since birth, Birmingham

"My mum's hearing aids help but not enough when the whole family is talking over each other. Captio AI at Sunday dinner means she follows everything now, not just the bits aimed directly at her."

Fiona M. 🇬🇧
fiona.m***@gmail.com
Hearing, mother has progressive hearing loss, Edinburgh

"My colleague and I share a desk. Before, I was writing everything on paper or sending emails for things that should take ten seconds to say. Now I just talk and he glances at his phone. Normal working day."

James T. 🇬🇧
james.t***@gmail.com
Hearing, deaf colleague, open-plan office, Leeds

"My flatmate is hard of hearing and we used to default to typing even when we were in the same room. Captio AI fixed that — I speak and she reads. It made living together easier immediately."

Rachel O. 🇬🇧
rachel.o***@gmail.com
Hearing, hard of hearing flatmate, Bristol

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in English.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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