Russian live captions and productivity tool for communicating with deaf & hoh
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Russian communicating with deaf & hoh
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Russian speakers.
You speak. They read.
- Your words appear on their screen word by word
- No sign language required from you
- Works at home, at work, anywhere
- Any accent, any pace
When language is also a barrier
- You speak your language, they read in theirs
- Translates in real time as you speak
- 60+ languages, no setup
- Handles mid-sentence switches
Save the conversation for them
- Record and transcribe any exchange
- They can review everything at their own pace
- Organised by speaker
- Any length, any format
Make sure nothing important was missed
- Key points extracted from any transcript
- Useful after appointments, meetings, or important conversations
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
A family dinner, a dacha weekend, a New Year gathering at home. You speak at your natural pace and your deaf or hard of hearing family member reads every word in real time without anyone having to slow down or repeat themselves.
Office conversations, quick questions at a colleague's desk, corridor exchanges. 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.
When your partner is deaf or hard of hearing and you are not. You speak naturally and they read every word as you say it. No more using the phone as a notepad between you in the same flat.
Morning conversations in the kitchen, questions across the room, catching up in the evening. Captio AI covers the low-stakes daily exchanges of shared home life — the moments that add up to closeness.
A relative visiting from another city, a new colleague joining the team, a neighbour at the door. You set up Captio AI and the conversation starts without any awkward preamble about how to communicate.
Family gatherings, New Year celebrations, workplace events 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 conversation happen around them.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
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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.
Why Russian is hard to understand
Palatalization
- Hard–soft consonant pairs are distinguished entirely inside the mouth
- Russian distinguishes hard and soft versions of nearly every consonant — /t/ vs /tʲ/, /n/ vs /nʲ/, /s/ vs /sʲ/. The soft version is produced by raising the body of the tongue toward the palate — entirely inside the mouth, with no change at the lips. This distinction runs through Russian grammar: noun cases, verb conjugations, diminutives. It is acoustically present and visually absent. A deaf person following a hearing partner or colleague hears the right word — the lip-reader misses the entire grammatical system.
Vowel reduction
- Unstressed Russian vowels reduce to sounds that look nothing like the written word
- In Russian, unstressed /o/ becomes /ɐ/ or /ə/; unstressed /e/ reduces similarly. In natural conversational speech, the vowel pattern a deaf person sees on the lips is entirely different from the vowel pattern in the written word. 'Молоко' (milk) is written with three /o/ vowels but pronounced with two reduced central vowels. The visual signal a hearing family member produces at a family dinner is systematically different from the written form of what they are saying.
Consonant clusters
- Russian speech streams through clusters of 3–4 consonants with no pauses
- Russian allows consonant clusters of three to four consonants at word beginnings and endings. 'Встреча' (meeting) opens with /vstr-/; 'здравствуйте' (hello) contains six consonants in sequence. In fast natural speech, these clusters compress further. The lip movements visible during a dense Russian consonant cluster carry very little recoverable phonological information — the visual signal briefly collapses.
Final devoicing
- Word-final voiced consonants become voiceless — the lips show the wrong sound
- In Russian, all voiced consonants become voiceless at the end of a word: /v/ → /f/, /b/ → /p/, /d/ → /t/, /g/ → /k/. The hearing speaker's brain compensates automatically. A deaf person lip-reading sees what looks like /f/ at a word boundary — but the word actually ends in /v/. Every word-final voiced consonant in Russian produces a misleading visual signal.
Conversational pace
- Russian between hearing people who know each other is fast and elliptical
- Conversational Russian at home, between friends, or in an office is fast. Informal speech reduces syllables, drops endings, and merges words across boundaries in ways that are natural for the hearing speaker and near-impossible to parse from the lips. The gap between the Russian a deaf person practised lip-reading in formal or educational contexts and what a hearing partner or family member uses at a family dinner is significant.
Download for free
Download on theApp Store9 million Russians with disabling hearing loss. The official count is 14 times lower.
The Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 estimates approximately 9 million Russians aged 15 and older have disabling hearing loss requiring intervention. In 2021, only 642,959 adults were officially diagnosed with permanent hearing loss in Russia — a gap that reflects chronic underdiagnosis, not a different underlying reality. The majority of deaf and hard of hearing Russians navigate daily life without formal recognition, without hearing aids, and without consistent access to support services.
Russia's Federal Law on Social Protection formally provides hearing aids and disability status for those with severe and profound hearing loss. Implementation varies dramatically by region: support is available in Moscow and St. Petersburg; in rural areas and smaller cities, specialized care is scarce and inconsistently funded. Research on hereditary hearing loss and sign language use in Russia has identified a significant population of deaf signers who are effectively outside formal support systems entirely.
Beyond policy, the social dimension is documented as a major issue. Research describes the ongoing marginalisation of deaf people in Russia, with social perceptions of disability — including deafness — that are frequently condescending. Hearing loss restricts communicative ability in social, occupational, educational, and psychological domains. Young and middle-aged deaf and hard of hearing Russians report the greatest difficulties in everyday communication situations — at home, at work, in social settings — where no formal system applies. Captio AI captions any hearing speaker's Russian in real time so a deaf or hard of hearing person reads every word at a family table, across a workplace desk, or in any everyday setting.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"My partner speaks fast Moscow Russian — consonant clusters, reduced vowels, at full speed. Captio AI reads every word as he says it. We stopped using the phone as a notepad between us."
"Office conversations in Russian move fast. The palatalized consonants are impossible to lip-read. Captio AI captions every word and I follow meetings as they happen instead of reconstructing them afterwards."
"My family speaks fast Siberian Russian at New Year and family dinners. Captio AI handles it without any adjustment from them — I follow everything at the table now."
"Fast conversational Russian is brutal to lip-read — word-final devoicing, palatalization, consonant clusters. Captio AI captures all of it acoustically and I read what was actually said, not what it looked like."
"My partner speaks fast Moscow Russian — consonant clusters, reduced vowels, at full speed. Captio AI reads every word as he says it. We stopped using the phone as a notepad between us."
"Office conversations in Russian move fast. The palatalized consonants are impossible to lip-read. Captio AI captions every word and I follow meetings as they happen instead of reconstructing them afterwards."
"My family speaks fast Siberian Russian at New Year and family dinners. Captio AI handles it without any adjustment from them — I follow everything at the table now."
"Fast conversational Russian is brutal to lip-read — word-final devoicing, palatalization, consonant clusters. Captio AI captures all of it acoustically and I read what was actually said, not what it looked like."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Make every conversation work — for both sides in Russian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store