Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

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

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

👨‍👩‍👧Family conversations

A Galician family meal in A Coruña, Santiago, or Ourense where grandparents speak strong local Galician, parents mix Galician and Spanish, and the conversation moves at speed. Captio AI captions every voice at the table.

💼As a hearing colleague

A Galician village or neighbourhood gathering where neighbours speak different regional dialects and generations switch between Galician and Spanish. Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard of hearing person part of it.

❤️Partners and relationships

At home with a hearing partner whose family speaks western Galician with gheada — a feature that sounds completely different from standard Galician taught in schools. Captio AI captions their speech correctly.

🏠Living together

Spontaneous household exchanges — morning questions, remarks from another room, quick conversations with hearing children who grew up switching between Galician and Spanish. Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard of hearing person connected.

🤝Introducing someone new

At the local market (mercado) or town fair, where vendors and neighbours speak fast Galician with strong regional features. Captio AI captions what the person at the stall is saying in real time.

👥Mixed group settings

Meeting a partner's Galician family in a rural village for the first time, where the Galician spoken is strongly dialectal. Captio AI captions the first conversation so it can be natural.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Galician
88.9%

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.

Galician

Why Galician is hard to understand

Gheada

  • A distinctive Galician feature realizes /g/ as a throat fricative — invisible at the lips
  • Galician gheada — found across western and central dialects — replaces the velar stop /g/ with a velar, pharyngeal, or glottal fricative [x, ħ, h]. A deaf lip reader sees lip positions identical to those for /g/ while the acoustic output is entirely different. The distinction is in the throat, not on the face, and it affects high-frequency vocabulary throughout everyday speech.

Seseo

  • Sibilant merger creates homophone pairs across the western and central dialect areas
  • Across much of the Galician-speaking area, /s/ and the inter-dental /θ/ (standard Castilian) have merged into a single [s]. This seseo means that many words a Spanish-influenced lip reader might distinguish by tongue position become phonologically identical in Galician. The merger creates repeated homophone situations invisible to a lip reader.

Seven-vowel system

  • Galician /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ create additional near-homophones absent from Castilian
  • Galician has seven vowel phonemes including the mid-open /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ not present in Castilian Spanish. These distinctions create word pairs that a Castilian-trained lip reader would expect to sound the same but in Galician are distinct. The lip shape differences between /e/ and /ɛ/, and between /o/ and /ɔ/, are subtle.

Four-province dialect variation

  • A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense, and Pontevedra each have distinct phonological profiles
  • Galician dialects differ across its four provinces in vowel quality, consonant realizations, and the presence or absence of gheada and seseo. A deaf person calibrated to standard Galician (or to one province's variety) encounters a different phonological profile from speakers of another province.

Galician–Spanish switching

  • Everyday Galician mixes with Castilian mid-sentence, producing unpredictable hybrid patterns
  • In everyday speech across Galicia, speakers mix Galician and Castilian Spanish — a phenomenon called castrapo — producing hybrid phonological patterns. A lip reader calibrated to either language alone encounters unpredictable alternation within a single sentence at the family dinner table.

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The Challenge

Spain's 1,064,000 deaf and hard of hearing people — including Galicia's older, rural population with higher hearing loss rates — navigate bilingual daily life without consistent communication access.

According to Spain's National Statistics Institute (INE) EDAD 2008 survey, 1,064,000 people in Spain are deaf or have a hearing disability — 2.3% of the national population. EuroTrak Spain data show that approximately one in ten people across Spain live with hearing loss, yet fewer than 40% use hearing aids. Galicia, with a population of approximately 2.7 million and an older demographic profile than the Spanish national average, carries a proportionally higher hearing loss burden — age-related hearing loss increases significantly among Galicia's older rural communities.

Law 27/2007 formally recognized Spanish Sign Language (LSE) across Spain. However, recognition primarily covers formal settings — education, public services, and broadcast media. Galicia has no separately codified regional sign language policy, meaning deaf Galicians must navigate everyday informal communication — family meals, neighbourhood gatherings, local market conversations — without any formal accessibility framework covering those settings.

The intersection of hearing loss and Galicia's bilingual landscape creates a specific challenge. In a region where Galician and Spanish are both official, and where everyday speech mixes the two, a deaf or hard of hearing person is navigating two phonological systems simultaneously. A 2021 CNSE monograph on deaf education in Spain documented persistent gaps between formal sign language policy and the daily reality of communication in bilingual settings.

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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 family speaks western Galician and uses gheada — the 'g' sounds like a throat fricative and I could never lip-read it. Captio AI reads it correctly and family dinner is easy now."

Carme F. 🇪🇸
carme.f***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks western Galician with gheada, A Coruña

"My partner's family is from a rural village in Ourense and the Galician is very strong. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and visits to the family home are no longer exhausting."

Xosé P. 🇪🇸
xose.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from rural Ourense, Ourense

"The market is fast and loud and neighbours speak strong Galician. Captio AI captions everything in real time and I can run errands without bringing anyone along."

Ánxela R. 🇪🇸
anxela.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing neighbours at the village market in Pontevedra, Pontevedra

"My colleagues switch between Galician and Spanish throughout the working day. Captio AI captures both languages and I follow the full conversation at work."

Manuel G. 🇪🇸
manuel.g***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues who switch between Galician and Spanish, Santiago de Compostela

"My family speaks western Galician and uses gheada — the 'g' sounds like a throat fricative and I could never lip-read it. Captio AI reads it correctly and family dinner is easy now."

Carme F. 🇪🇸
carme.f***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks western Galician with gheada, A Coruña

"My partner's family is from a rural village in Ourense and the Galician is very strong. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and visits to the family home are no longer exhausting."

Xosé P. 🇪🇸
xose.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from rural Ourense, Ourense

"The market is fast and loud and neighbours speak strong Galician. Captio AI captions everything in real time and I can run errands without bringing anyone along."

Ánxela R. 🇪🇸
anxela.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing neighbours at the village market in Pontevedra, Pontevedra

"My colleagues switch between Galician and Spanish throughout the working day. Captio AI captures both languages and I follow the full conversation at work."

Manuel G. 🇪🇸
manuel.g***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues who switch between Galician and Spanish, Santiago de Compostela

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Galician.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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