Swedish 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 Swedish communicating with deaf & hoh
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Swedish 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.
Swedish families talk at the kitchen table in the direct, unhurried way of people comfortable with each other. Captio AI captions your hearing family's Swedish in real time so you follow the whole conversation — not just the parts where someone turned to face you.
In a Stockholm or Gothenburg office, colleagues exchange quick questions in the direct informal Swedish of everyday work. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so your deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows hallway chats, desk questions, and team conversations.
When your partner speaks Swedish naturally and you are deaf or hard of hearing, Captio AI closes the gap. They talk; you read. The evening conversation at home is something you have fully, not in fragments.
Morning exchanges over coffee, questions across the apartment, comments about the weather or the news. Captio AI covers the small daily Swedish moments that make home feel connected — in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, or a village in Norrland.
When you meet a hearing Swedish speaker for the first time, Captio AI starts immediately. They speak; you read. No awkward briefing, no searching for a way to communicate.
At a midsommar gathering, a family birthday, or a neighbourhood evening, people talk over each other and the room fills with noise. Captio AI captions whoever you point your phone at so you are part of the occasion.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
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 Swedish is hard to understand
Two pitch accents
- Swedish distinguishes words by two tonal patterns — Accent 1 and Accent 2 — that are entirely auditory with no lip correlate
- Swedish has two phonemic pitch accents — Accent 1 (rising-falling) and Accent 2 (falling-rising) — that distinguish words like anden (the duck) from anden (the spirit). The two accents involve completely different melodic contours over the syllable but produce identical lip shapes. For a deaf or HoH person at a Swedish family table, the tonal system represents one of the most complete phonological blind spots in any European language.
The sj-sound
- The Swedish sj-sound is produced back in the vocal tract and looks nearly identical across all its dialect variants
- The Swedish sj-sound /ɧ/ — the initial consonant in sjö (lake), skjorta (shirt), and stjärna (star) — is a simultaneous postalveolar-velar fricative realized differently by every regional dialect, from labialised [ɧʷ] in Stockholm to a retroflex quality further north. Across all variants, it involves no clear lip articulation. In a Gothenburg household versus a Stockholm one, the same word beginning may look and sound different — but consistently leaves no visible trace.
Eighteen-vowel phonemic inventory
- Swedish's nine vowel qualities each have a long and short variant — 18 distinctions, most of which are invisible on the lips
- Swedish has nine vowel qualities, each existing as a long and short version: 18 phonemic vowels in total. The long/short contrast is primarily durational and auditory; the mouth shape for a given vowel quality looks nearly the same whether the vowel is long or short. In fast conversational speech at a Stockholm family dinner, the distinction that determines whether a word means one thing or another may be one that leaves no trace on the face.
Dialect diversity across regions
- Swedish dialects vary enough that Skånska and Norrlandic Swedish are difficult even for hearing speakers — and completely different on the lips for a deaf person
- Swedish dialects range from the sing-song Dalarna varieties to the near-Danish Skånska in the south. Pitch accent contours differ between regions; vowel qualities shift dramatically. For a deaf or HoH person who lip-reads a Stockholm family member, a visit from relatives from Norrland or Skåne means reading a completely different phonological system off the same familiar faces.
Connected-speech compression
- Unstressed syllables reduce and disappear in fast Swedish, removing the lip-reading anchors between content words
- Swedish reduces unstressed syllables aggressively in natural speech — inte (not) becomes int, jag (I) becomes ja, har (have) becomes ha at the pace of normal conversation. These reductions are standard in everyday Swedish and sound natural to all speakers; a deaf or HoH person, however, must recognise words from their reduced forms, not the full forms found in textbooks or formal speech.
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Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Sweden: early recognition, strong systems, and the informal gap
Sweden recognised Swedish Sign Language (SSL — Svenskt teckenspråk) in 1981, making it one of the first countries in the world to grant its national sign language formal status. Sweden subsequently developed a sign-bilingual education model at deaf schools that has been widely cited internationally as a reference point for deaf education policy. A population study in the county of Västerbotten found a hearing impairment prevalence of 2.6 per 1,000 among children born between 1964 and 1983, and a PubMed study of Swedish adults documented the expected age-related hearing loss pattern rising steeply from middle age onward.
Despite the strength of Sweden's institutional framework — one of the most developed in Europe — the formal provision still does not reach informal daily life. An SSL interpreter can be arranged for work meetings, medical appointments, or official situations. They cannot be present at the kitchen table for an evening conversation, at a midsommar dinner with extended family, or in the natural back-and-forth of living with hearing housemates. These moments are where the gap is felt most acutely by deaf and hard of hearing Swedes, and they are the moments no policy has ever been designed to cover.
A DiVA Portal study of the position of deaf people in the Swedish labour market documented the persistent gap between institutional support and actual workplace integration, finding that deaf people remain underrepresented in employment and in higher education tracks, despite the legal and educational framework. Communication access in informal settings is the piece that formal policy cannot deliver.
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
"Swedish pitch accent and the sj-sound are impossible to lip-read. My partner speaks at his normal pace and I was catching about half. Captio AI reads his Swedish in real time and our evenings are easy now."
"Skånska sounds nothing like Stockholm Swedish and the vowels are completely different on the lips. Captio AI reads my family's dialect correctly and I follow the whole dinner conversation."
"My colleagues talk fast in Gothenburg Swedish and nobody always faces me. Captio AI captions their speech in real time and I follow desk conversations without asking for written summaries."
"My grandchildren speak the compressed informal Swedish of their generation — jag becomes ja, inte becomes int. Captio AI reads their speech and I follow without needing them to slow down."
"Swedish pitch accent and the sj-sound are impossible to lip-read. My partner speaks at his normal pace and I was catching about half. Captio AI reads his Swedish in real time and our evenings are easy now."
"Skånska sounds nothing like Stockholm Swedish and the vowels are completely different on the lips. Captio AI reads my family's dialect correctly and I follow the whole dinner conversation."
"My colleagues talk fast in Gothenburg Swedish and nobody always faces me. Captio AI captions their speech in real time and I follow desk conversations without asking for written summaries."
"My grandchildren speak the compressed informal Swedish of their generation — jag becomes ja, inte becomes int. Captio AI reads their speech and I follow without needing them to slow down."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Make every conversation work — for both sides in Swedish.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
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Download on theApp Store