Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Greek 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

👨‍👩‍👧Family conversations

Greek families talk around the table with the warmth and volume of people who see conversation as the point of gathering. Captio AI captions your hearing family's Greek in real time so you follow everything — not just the fragments directed at you.

💼As a hearing colleague

In an Athens or Thessaloniki office, colleagues exchange questions across desks in fast everyday Greek. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so your deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows informal exchanges and team conversations.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner speaks Greek naturally and you are deaf or hard of hearing, Captio AI closes the gap. They talk at their normal pace; you read every word. The daily conversation at home is easy.

🏠Living together

Morning coffee exchanges, questions from the balcony, comments about the news. Captio AI covers the small daily Greek moments that make home feel connected — in Athens, Thessaloniki, or a village in the islands.

🤝Introducing someone new

When you meet a hearing Greek speaker for the first time, Captio AI starts immediately. They speak; you read. No awkward explanation, no searching for a notebook.

👥Mixed group settings

At a family name day celebration, a wedding, or a neighbourhood barbecue, everyone talks at once and the room fills with the noise of a Greek gathering. Captio AI captions whoever you point your phone at so you are fully part of it.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Greek
92.6%

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.

Greek

Why Greek is hard to understand

Six-fricative inventory

  • Modern Greek has six fricative sounds, many produced mid-palate or at the throat with no visible lip movement
  • Modern Greek has fricatives at the dental (θ/ð), velar (x/ɣ), and labiodental (f/v) positions. While labiodental fricatives show some lip involvement, dental and velar fricatives leave no labial trace. Words that hinge on θ vs. ð or on x vs. ɣ are genuinely difficult to distinguish by lip shape alone in a family living room or at a neighbourhood table.

Stress-accent interaction

  • Greek phonemic stress changes word meaning, and fast informal speech compresses the prominence difference between syllables
  • Greek marks lexical items by stress position — pápa (pope) vs. papá (dad). In casual, fast speech among family members, the prominence difference between stressed and unstressed syllables compresses, making the contrast harder to recover from lip shapes. The intonation contour of everyday Greek in a Thessaloniki household sounds and looks different from careful pronunciation.

Cypriot Greek divergence

  • Cypriot Greek preserves geminate consonants and aspirated plosives absent from Standard Modern Greek — making familiar words look different on the lips
  • Cypriot Greek maintains phonological features the standard variety has lost — geminate consonants (kk, pp, tt), aspirated plosives, and post-alveolar fricatives. For a deaf or HoH person calibrated to Athens standard Greek, a family member from Cyprus produces words that, on the lips, are shaped differently in ways that make familiar vocabulary look unfamiliar.

Legacy of diglossia

  • Older speakers may use phonological forms from the formal Katharevousa register, creating a mismatch with the everyday Demotic a deaf person has calibrated to
  • Greece operated under formal diglossia between Katharevousa and Demotic Greek until 1976. Older family members — grandparents at a family gathering — may still use phonological forms and vocabulary drawn from the formal register. A deaf or HoH person calibrated to everyday Demotic may encounter lip shapes rooted in an older pronunciation pattern they have not trained on.

Casual vowel and consonant reduction

  • In fast everyday Greek, consonant clusters reduce and unstressed vowels drop at a pace that outstrips lip-reading
  • Greek drops unstressed syllables in fast speech — kai su becomes ksu at casual pace, consonant clusters assimilate at word boundaries. In a family kitchen or at a neighbour's table, the gap between careful classroom pronunciation and real conversational Greek is wide enough that a deaf or HoH person faces near-constant mismatch between what they see and what they were trained to expect.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Greece: prevalence, reduced services, and educational barriers

Greece has approximately 25,000 deaf individuals and around 40,000 people with residual hearing, according to the Federation of the Deaf of Greece. Greek Sign Language (GSL) was officially recognised in 2000 — one of the earlier European recognitions — and an estimated 40,600 people use GSL, a figure that has been growing as interest from hearing learners increases. However, among deaf adults in the country, only 9% have completed tertiary education, according to a cross-sectional study published in PMC (PMC6174559), reflecting deep systemic educational failure that has structured social opportunity for deaf Greeks across generations.

A significant policy reversal in 2011 cut the formal interpretation provision available to GSL users from full state-funded coverage to 25 hours per year. This reduction directly limited the settings in which deaf Greeks could access spoken language through a formal intermediary. Prior to 2011, interpretation costs for all communication needs were paid by the state; after 2011, a 25-hour annual cap applied. This change affected everything from accessing government services to attending medical appointments — and left informal social settings entirely uncovered, as they had always been.

Unemployment among disabled people in Greece runs at three to four times the rate of the general population. For deaf and hard of hearing Greeks, the educational gap (9% tertiary completion) and the communication access gap compound each other. The same PMC study documented significant barriers to healthcare access, with deaf adults in Greece reporting difficulty accessing health services due to communication barriers — a finding that underscores how deeply access limitations reach into daily life, not only formal social participation.

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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 talks fast and everyone at once — the fricatives and the fast speech all blur together. Captio AI reads their Greek in real time and I follow the full dinner conversation, not just the sentences aimed at me."

Eleni P. 🇬🇷
eleni.p***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks fast Athens Greek at home, Athens

"My partner's Cypriot Greek has sounds that standard Greek doesn't — doubled consonants, different fricatives. Captio AI reads both varieties correctly and our evenings at home are easy now."

Nikos K. 🇬🇷
nikos.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from Cyprus speaks Cypriot Greek, Athens

"My colleagues at work speak fast Cypriot Greek and nobody always remembers to face me. Captio AI captions their speech in real time and I follow conversations without needing written summaries."

Maria T. 🇨🇾
maria.t***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues in Nicosia office, Nicosia

"My grandchildren speak the fast informal Greek of their generation. I was catching fragments. Captio AI reads their speech and I understand them without asking them to slow down or repeat for me."

Georgios A. 🇬🇷
georgios.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 68, grandchildren speak fast colloquial Greek, Thessaloniki

"My family talks fast and everyone at once — the fricatives and the fast speech all blur together. Captio AI reads their Greek in real time and I follow the full dinner conversation, not just the sentences aimed at me."

Eleni P. 🇬🇷
eleni.p***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks fast Athens Greek at home, Athens

"My partner's Cypriot Greek has sounds that standard Greek doesn't — doubled consonants, different fricatives. Captio AI reads both varieties correctly and our evenings at home are easy now."

Nikos K. 🇬🇷
nikos.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from Cyprus speaks Cypriot Greek, Athens

"My colleagues at work speak fast Cypriot Greek and nobody always remembers to face me. Captio AI captions their speech in real time and I follow conversations without needing written summaries."

Maria T. 🇨🇾
maria.t***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues in Nicosia office, Nicosia

"My grandchildren speak the fast informal Greek of their generation. I was catching fragments. Captio AI reads their speech and I understand them without asking them to slow down or repeat for me."

Georgios A. 🇬🇷
georgios.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 68, grandchildren speak fast colloquial Greek, Thessaloniki

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Greek.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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