Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hindi 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

A family meal, a festive gathering, a phone call from relatives in another state. You speak at your natural pace — your regional variant, your Hinglish mix — and your deaf or hard of hearing family member reads every word in real time without anyone having to slow down.

💼As a hearing colleague

Office conversations, quick questions across the desk, hallway exchanges in a Hindi-speaking workplace. 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 Delhi Hindi, Mumbai Hindi, or Hinglish — and they read every word as you say it. No more typing messages across the same room.

🏠Living together

Questions from the kitchen, conversations across the corridor, catching up after work. Captio AI covers the ordinary low-stakes exchanges of shared home life — the ones that feel small but add up to connection over time.

🤝Introducing someone new

A relative arriving from another city, a friend's partner meeting everyone for the first time, a new neighbour at the door. You set up Captio AI and the conversation starts without any awkward briefing about how to communicate.

👥Mixed group settings

Festivals, family functions, work celebrations where some people are deaf or hard of hearing and some are not. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so nobody is left watching the group conversation happen around them.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hindi
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.

Hindi

Why Hindi is hard to understand

Retroflex invisibility

  • Hindi's retroflex consonants are produced entirely inside the mouth
  • Hindi has four retroflex consonants (ट, ठ, ड, ढ) produced by curling the tongue tip back to the roof of the mouth — with no visible change at the lips. On the lips, retroflexes look identical to their dental counterparts. The contrast between /t̪/ and /ʈ/, /d̪/ and /ɖ/ runs through Hindi vocabulary and grammar, is acoustically distinct, and is visually absent. A deaf person following a hearing family member or colleague in conversation cannot recover this distinction.

Aspiration pairs

  • Aspirated consonants look identical to unaspirated ones on the lips
  • Hindi distinguishes aspirated from unaspirated stops across four places of articulation: /p/ vs /pʰ/, /b/ vs /bʱ/, /k/ vs /kʰ/, /g/ vs /gʱ/. Aspiration is a puff of air — acoustic, not visual. The lip shape in 'pal' (पल, moment) and 'phal' (फल, fruit) is identical. These minimal pairs are common throughout Hindi vocabulary and are entirely invisible in lip-reading. A deaf person following a hearing speaker misses this distinction entirely.

Hinglish switching

  • Urban Hindi switches to English mid-sentence without any signal
  • Urban Hindi — in families, offices, and social settings — switches freely between Hindi and English. A hearing colleague might state something in English, discuss it in Hindi, and summarise in a blend of both. For a deaf or hard of hearing person following a hearing speaker, each switch resets the phonological system they are trying to read — without any warning that the switch has happened.

Fast casual rate

  • Hindi between people who know each other is fast and compressed
  • Conversational Hindi between hearing people who know each other — at home, in an office, in social settings — is fast. Vowels reduce, consonant clusters compress, and syllable boundaries disappear. The gap between the careful Hindi in formal speech and the natural pace a hearing partner or family member uses across the kitchen or at a family gathering is significant.

Dialectal variation

  • A hearing speaker from Bihar sounds nothing like one from Delhi
  • Hindi spans a wide range of regional varieties — Bihari, Rajasthani, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi — each with distinct phonological features that alter the lip pattern. A deaf person who grew up lip-reading one Hindi variety will find a hearing speaker from a different region near-impossible to follow without additional tools. Even within major cities, registers and accents vary significantly by neighbourhood and community.

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The Challenge

63 million deaf and hard of hearing in India. The gap starts at home.

India is home to approximately 63 million deaf and hard of hearing people — one of the largest such populations in the world. Despite this scale, resources remain critically limited. Analysis of the 2011 Census found that of 13.4 million working-age people with hearing disability, 73.9% were classed as marginal workers — meaning only 26.1% had stable employment. The economic exclusion is severe. And it begins, for most people, not in a workplace or a government office, but in a family conversation.

India's National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness (NPPCD), launched in 2008, set a target of reducing the deafness burden to below 1% by 2030. WHO assessments indicate India is far from meeting that target. The programme focuses on prevention and early intervention. It does not address the daily communication gap between deaf and hard of hearing people and their hearing family members, colleagues, and communities. Sign language interpretation in India remains critically underfunded and geographically concentrated in major urban centres.

The consequences fall hardest in family and social settings. India's deaf community has described the situation plainly: the real issue is not legislation but the 'woeful inadequacy of facilities of any type for the deaf.' For the majority of deaf and hard of hearing Indians, the primary communication environment is the family home — where hearing family members speak Hindi at a natural pace, with no tool to make that speech readable. Captio AI captions any hearing speaker's Hindi in real time — across dialects, registers, and Hinglish switching — so a deaf or hard of hearing person reads every word at a family gathering, across a desk, or wherever a hearing person speaks to them.

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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 husband speaks fast Delhi Hindi — retroflex consonants, Hinglish switches, the lot. I was catching maybe a third of it. Captio AI reads every word as he says it. We stopped texting each other at home."

Priya S. 🇮🇳
priya.s***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband, Delhi

"My colleagues speak fast Mumbai Hindi heavy with English and Marathi. I was always a step behind. With Captio AI I follow the conversation as it happens, not reconstruct it afterwards."

Rohan M. 🇮🇳
rohan.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing colleagues, Mumbai

"My family's Hindi has a Southern accent that was completely different from what I could lip-read. Captio AI handles it without any adjustment from them."

Anita K. 🇮🇳
anita.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Hindi with Tamil accent, Chennai

"My partner speaks Awadhi-influenced Hindi at home. The phonology was different enough that I missed a lot. Captio AI reads whatever she says and I stopped asking her to repeat."

Deepak V. 🇮🇳
deepak.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner, Lucknow

"My husband speaks fast Delhi Hindi — retroflex consonants, Hinglish switches, the lot. I was catching maybe a third of it. Captio AI reads every word as he says it. We stopped texting each other at home."

Priya S. 🇮🇳
priya.s***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband, Delhi

"My colleagues speak fast Mumbai Hindi heavy with English and Marathi. I was always a step behind. With Captio AI I follow the conversation as it happens, not reconstruct it afterwards."

Rohan M. 🇮🇳
rohan.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing colleagues, Mumbai

"My family's Hindi has a Southern accent that was completely different from what I could lip-read. Captio AI handles it without any adjustment from them."

Anita K. 🇮🇳
anita.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Hindi with Tamil accent, Chennai

"My partner speaks Awadhi-influenced Hindi at home. The phonology was different enough that I missed a lot. Captio AI reads whatever she says and I stopped asking her to repeat."

Deepak V. 🇮🇳
deepak.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner, Lucknow

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Hindi.

Captio AI is free to start

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