Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Marathi 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

Marathi family meals in Maharashtra — in Pune, Nashik, Nagpur, or a village home — often involve multiple generations speaking fast conversational Marathi, mixing English words and occasionally switching to a home dialect. A hearing family member speaks naturally. Captio AI captions what they say in real time so a deaf or hard of hearing family member follows without asking anyone to repeat.

💼As a hearing colleague

Pune and Mumbai workplaces run on a fast Marathi–English mix for informal exchanges. A hearing colleague speaks in whichever blend comes naturally — formal Marathi for some situations, fast mixed speech for most. Captio AI captions everything so a deaf or hard of hearing colleague keeps up with corridor talk, quick instructions, and team discussions.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner is deaf or hard of hearing and Marathi is your shared language at home. You speak naturally — the way you always do. Captio AI puts every word on their screen as you say it so nothing is lost in the home conversation.

🏠Living together

Everyday home life in a Marathi household — calling from the kitchen, talking during the evening news, questions while getting ready in the morning. Captio AI covers the continuous everyday thread that a deaf or hard of hearing family member might otherwise piece together from fragments.

🤝Introducing someone new

When a deaf or hard of hearing person meets a new hearing Marathi speaker — at a family function, a puja, or a neighbourhood gathering. Set up Captio AI and the conversation begins without anyone needing to adjust how they speak.

👥Mixed group settings

Group settings — a family gathering for Ganesh Chaturthi, a large multi-generation meal, or a mixed household — where some people are deaf or hard of hearing and some are not. Captio AI captions whoever is talking so everyone in the room is part of the same conversation.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Marathi
93.1%

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.

Marathi

Why Marathi is hard to understand

Aspirated stop contrast

  • Aspirated and unaspirated Marathi stops look the same but mean different things
  • Marathi has a four-way voicing and aspiration contrast in stops: /b/ vs. /bʰ/, /d/ vs. /dʰ/, /g/ vs. /gʰ/. All are produced at the same place in the mouth. Aspiration — the audible burst of air — has no lip-visible equivalent. A deaf lip-reader sees the same bilabial or dental closure for 'ba' and 'bha' and cannot distinguish them without hearing.

Retroflex consonants

  • Retroflex sounds happen behind the lips — invisible in everyday Marathi
  • Marathi uses retroflex stops /ʈ/, /ɖ/ and a retroflex nasal /ɳ/ — produced with the tongue curled back behind the dental ridge. The articulation happens entirely behind the lips and produces no visible difference from the dental counterparts /t/, /d/. These sounds appear in common everyday words, not just edge cases.

42-dialect landscape

  • Varhadi and Pune Marathi are lip-read as almost different languages
  • Indic scholars distinguish 42 dialects of spoken Marathi — Varhadi, Ahirani, Khandeshi, Konkani Marathi, and the Pune and Mumbai urban varieties all carry distinct vowel systems and stress patterns. A deaf person who lip-reads Pune Marathi may find a hearing relative from Vidarbha speaking an almost different phonological profile.

Word-final nasal drop

  • Casual Marathi drops the word-ending sounds that signal boundaries
  • In casual Marathi speech, word-final nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ are frequently weakened or dropped entirely. The lip shape that signals the word boundary disappears in fast family conversation, making it harder to segment where one word ends and the next begins — a basic task that is already hard without hearing.

Marathi–English code-switching

  • Urban Marathi switches language mid-sentence with no visual warning
  • In Pune and Mumbai, hearing speakers blend Marathi with English so fluidly that the language of a given word is unpredictable mid-sentence. Code-switching without auditory cues is especially disorienting for a deaf lip-reader tracking two distinct phonological systems at once.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Maharashtra and India: the second most common disability

The WHO estimates approximately 63 million people in India suffer from significant auditory impairment — 6.3% of the total population. India's National Sample Survey records 291 persons per 100,000 with severe to profound hearing loss, with rural areas disproportionately affected: 310 per 100,000 rural compared to 236 per 100,000 urban (National Medical Journal of India). Hearing disability is the second most common form of disability in India and the leading cause of sensory deficit. Maharashtra ranks among the Indian states with the highest disability prevalence rates, and its National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness (NPPCD) has uneven coverage across rural districts in Vidarbha and Marathwada.

India has one national sign language, Indian Sign Language (ISL), but its reach into Maharashtra's 36 districts is limited — concentrated in Pune and Mumbai. For the large majority of deaf and hard of hearing Marathi speakers, especially in smaller cities and rural areas, communication with hearing family members depends entirely on what the hearing person is willing to do: slow down, repeat, write things out. The structural imbalance — the adjustment burden falling on the person who hears least — is the default condition of daily life for millions of Marathi-speaking households.

The Global Burden of Disease study 2019 estimated that over 1.57 billion people globally live with hearing loss of any degree, with South Asia bearing a disproportionate share of years lived with disability due to hearing conditions (PMC7960691). India's NFHS-5 data (2019–21) confirmed that socioeconomic and geographic disparities significantly shape who receives a diagnosis and who accesses any intervention — leaving the poorest and most rural households the furthest behind. In a Marathi household where a deaf family member sits at a table full of hearing relatives, the conversation happens around them, not with 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 Pune Marathi the way everyone does in Pune — fast, with English words dropped in mid-sentence. Captio AI reads all of it correctly. I follow the actual conversation now, not a rough idea of it."

Priya D. 🇮🇳
priya.d***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband speaks Pune Marathi with English mixing, Pune

"Varhadi has different vowels and rhythm from standard Marathi. My family gatherings were mostly lost to me. Captio AI captures what everyone is saying accurately — including my grandmother's old-style Varhadi — and I follow the table for the first time."

Suresh P. 🇮🇳
suresh.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Varhadi Marathi, Nagpur

"Mumbai Marathi is mixed with Hindi and English and moves very fast. I was nodding through most of it. Captio AI captions what my colleagues say in real time and I actually participate in office conversations now."

Anita K. 🇮🇳
anita.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues speak fast Mumbai Marathi, Mumbai

"My grandchildren speak a version of Marathi I barely recognise — English everywhere. Captio AI reads it word for word as they say it. I understand them without asking them to slow down or switch languages for me."

Ramesh N. 🇮🇳
ramesh.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 60, hearing grandchildren speak modern Marathi–English, Nashik

"My husband speaks Pune Marathi the way everyone does in Pune — fast, with English words dropped in mid-sentence. Captio AI reads all of it correctly. I follow the actual conversation now, not a rough idea of it."

Priya D. 🇮🇳
priya.d***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband speaks Pune Marathi with English mixing, Pune

"Varhadi has different vowels and rhythm from standard Marathi. My family gatherings were mostly lost to me. Captio AI captures what everyone is saying accurately — including my grandmother's old-style Varhadi — and I follow the table for the first time."

Suresh P. 🇮🇳
suresh.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Varhadi Marathi, Nagpur

"Mumbai Marathi is mixed with Hindi and English and moves very fast. I was nodding through most of it. Captio AI captions what my colleagues say in real time and I actually participate in office conversations now."

Anita K. 🇮🇳
anita.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues speak fast Mumbai Marathi, Mumbai

"My grandchildren speak a version of Marathi I barely recognise — English everywhere. Captio AI reads it word for word as they say it. I understand them without asking them to slow down or switch languages for me."

Ramesh N. 🇮🇳
ramesh.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 60, hearing grandchildren speak modern Marathi–English, Nashik

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Marathi.

Captio AI is free to start

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