Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Punjabi 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

Punjabi family meals — in Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh, Lahore, or a family home abroad — are loud, warm, and fast. Hearing family members speak naturally in whichever blend of Punjabi, Hindi or Urdu comes naturally to them. Captio AI captions what they say so a deaf or hard of hearing family member follows without asking anyone to repeat.

💼As a hearing colleague

Punjabi workplaces in the Punjab region mix Punjabi with the dominant regional language for different situations. A hearing colleague speaks in whichever language fits the moment. Captio AI captions everything so a deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows desk conversations and quick exchanges without missing a word.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner is deaf or hard of hearing and Punjabi is the language you speak at home. You talk naturally — casual, fast Punjabi the way you always speak. Captio AI puts every word on their screen as you say it so nothing is lost between you.

🏠Living together

Everyday home life in a Punjabi household — shouting across the kitchen, talking over the evening news, quick questions before heading out. Captio AI covers the continuous thread of home conversation 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 Punjabi speaker — at a family event, a community gathering, or a wedding. Set up Captio AI and the conversation starts naturally, without anyone needing to adjust how they speak.

👥Mixed group settings

Group settings — a family wedding, a large langar meal, a mixed gathering — where some people are deaf or hard of hearing and some are not. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so every person at the table is fully part of the conversation.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Punjabi
90%

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.

Punjabi

Why Punjabi is hard to understand

Lexical tone — rare in Indo-Aryan

  • Punjabi uses tone to change word meaning — but tone is invisible at the lips
  • Punjabi is one of the very few Indo-Aryan languages with a lexical tone system: three tones (low, high, and level) distinguish word meaning. The same consonant-vowel sequence with a different pitch means a different word. Tone is entirely auditory — the lips produce the same shape regardless of which tone is spoken. A deaf lip-reader has no access to the tonal dimension that separates meaning.

Aspirated stop contrast

  • Aspirated and plain stops look identical at the lips in everyday Punjabi
  • Punjabi, like other South Asian languages, has a four-way voicing and aspiration contrast in stops — /p/, /pʰ/, /b/, /bʰ/. The aspiration is an auditory burst of air with no lip-visible equivalent. 'Pa' and 'pha', 'ba' and 'bha' — all produce the same lip closure for a deaf lip-reader, collapsing distinctions that matter throughout everyday vocabulary.

Indian vs. Pakistani Punjabi split

  • Indian and Pakistani Punjabi carry different phonological patterns
  • Punjabi speakers in India write in Gurmukhi and those in Pakistan write in Shahmukhi (Arabic-derived). The two communities have developed somewhat different phonological norms through decades of separate linguistic evolution and Urdu influence in Pakistan. A deaf person who lip-reads Indian Punjabi finds that a hearing family member from Pakistan uses different prosodic patterns for some words.

Fast casual contraction

  • Colloquial Punjabi contracts heavily — hearing family speech sheds syllables
  • Conversational Punjabi at home pace contracts significantly: verb forms shed syllables, common phrases compress into shorter forms. A deaf lip-reader who has learned the full forms of Punjabi words expects mouth shapes that a hearing family member at normal conversational speed simply does not produce — the visible target moves.

Punjabi–Urdu / Punjabi–Hindi code-switching

  • Punjabi family speech switches to Urdu or Hindi with no visual warning
  • In Pakistan, hearing family members naturally switch between Punjabi and Urdu; in India, between Punjabi and Hindi. The code-switch is conversational and unpredictable. For a deaf lip-reader, the phonological system can change mid-sentence — and the mouth shapes that were making sense suddenly don't map to anything in Punjabi.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Punjab: across two countries, the same daily gap

In the Punjab region of Pakistan, a district-level survey identified 144,418 persons classified as deaf — approximately 0.2% of the surveyed population. A separate rural study in Sialkot district found hearing impairment in 7.9% of school-age children, and genetic research found that GJB2-related mutations account for at least 20% of severe-to-profound hearing loss cases in Southern Punjab — pointing to a significant burden that exceeds official registration counts (PMC8544867). WHO data for Pakistan documents hearing impairment as a major cause of disability among children, with cascading effects on education and social participation.

In the Indian state of Punjab, the national statistics apply: approximately 63 million people in India have significant hearing loss (WHO), with 291 per 100,000 having severe-to-profound loss. Rural Punjab carries higher rates than urban areas. Indian Sign Language (ISL) has limited reach in Punjabi-speaking communities outside major cities, and formal audiological services — while improving — remain uneven across the state. In Pakistan, the equivalent gap is at least as wide, with limited ISL-equivalent provision (Pakistan Sign Language has a small formal community) and hearing aid coverage far below need.

Across both Punjabs, the communication gap at the family level is the daily reality for a deaf or hard of hearing person. The structural support that would make family conversations naturally accessible — sign language, real-time captioning, trained interpreters — is absent in most households. Captio AI captions natural Punjabi speech in real time, at a family meal in Lahore or a langar gathering in Amritsar, so a deaf family member reads what their hearing relatives are actually saying without asking anyone to slow down.

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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

"Colloquial Punjabi at home pace is contracted and fast. Captio AI reads what my husband actually says — not the formal version, the real thing. I follow our conversations without needing him to write anything down."

Harpreet K. 🇮🇳
harpreet.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband speaks fast colloquial Punjabi, Amritsar

"My family switches between Punjabi and Hindi without thinking about it. Captio AI captions both accurately and I follow the conversation at family meals instead of catching fragments."

Simran B. 🇮🇳
simran.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Punjabi mixed with Hindi, Ludhiana

"Lahori Punjabi is fast and mixes with Urdu throughout. Captio AI handles both and I follow what my family says at the dinner table for the first time without guessing."

Tariq A. 🇵🇰
tariq.a***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Lahori Punjabi, Lahore

"My family in Southall switches between Punjabi and English constantly. Captio AI reads both and I follow the family gathering without sitting at the edge of the conversation."

Gurpreet S. 🇬🇧
gurpreet.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 58, UK Punjabi diaspora family, Southall

"Colloquial Punjabi at home pace is contracted and fast. Captio AI reads what my husband actually says — not the formal version, the real thing. I follow our conversations without needing him to write anything down."

Harpreet K. 🇮🇳
harpreet.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband speaks fast colloquial Punjabi, Amritsar

"My family switches between Punjabi and Hindi without thinking about it. Captio AI captions both accurately and I follow the conversation at family meals instead of catching fragments."

Simran B. 🇮🇳
simran.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Punjabi mixed with Hindi, Ludhiana

"Lahori Punjabi is fast and mixes with Urdu throughout. Captio AI handles both and I follow what my family says at the dinner table for the first time without guessing."

Tariq A. 🇵🇰
tariq.a***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Lahori Punjabi, Lahore

"My family in Southall switches between Punjabi and English constantly. Captio AI reads both and I follow the family gathering without sitting at the edge of the conversation."

Gurpreet S. 🇬🇧
gurpreet.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 58, UK Punjabi diaspora family, Southall

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Punjabi.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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