Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Thai 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

Thai family meals — in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, or a family home in a provincial town — are warm and busy, with hearing family members speaking naturally in regional Thai at full conversational pace. Captio AI captions what each person says in real time so a deaf or hard of hearing family member follows without asking anyone to repeat.

💼As a hearing colleague

Thai workplaces run in standard Thai for most exchanges, with English mixed in for technical and formal contexts. A hearing colleague speaks at their normal pace. Captio AI captions what they say so a deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows desk conversations, instructions, and corridor exchanges without missing a word.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner is deaf or hard of hearing and Thai is the language you speak at home. You talk naturally — at your normal pace, in the casual Thai of daily life. 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 Thai household — calling from another room, talking while cooking, quick questions before leaving the house. 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 Thai speaker — at a family gathering, a temple event, or through a mutual friend. Set up Captio AI and the conversation begins naturally, without anyone needing to adjust how they speak.

👥Mixed group settings

Group settings — a Songkran family gathering, a large family meal, or a mixed social event — where some people are deaf or hard of hearing and some are not. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so every person in the group is fully included in the conversation.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Thai
90.5%

character 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.

Thai

Why Thai is hard to understand

Five tones, zero visual signal

  • The same Thai syllable means five different things — all look identical at the lips
  • Thai has five lexical tones (mid, low, falling, high, rising) that completely change word meaning. The syllable 'maa' can mean horse, dog, come, or have depending on pitch contour. Pitch is entirely auditory — the lips produce the same shape for all five tones. A deaf lip-reader has no visual access to the primary disambiguation tool of Thai.

Aspiration contrast

  • Aspirated and plain Thai stops look identical at the lips
  • Thai systematically distinguishes aspirated stops /pʰ/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/ from their unaspirated counterparts /p/, /t/, /k/. The contrast is acoustic — a burst of air — with no lip-visible equivalent. At the lips, both produce the same closure. This contrast appears throughout everyday Thai vocabulary and collapses completely for a deaf lip-reader.

Unreleased final stops

  • Thai word endings close the mouth but give no visible signal
  • Thai allows only a restricted set of final consonants, and stop codas (/p/, /t/, /k/) are unreleased in natural speech — the mouth closes without a burst. For a deaf lip-reader, word endings produce a closed mouth with no further information, making it impossible to distinguish between the possible final consonants that change word meaning.

Northern, Isan, and Southern Thai

  • Bangkok Thai and regional Thai are different lip-reading tasks
  • Standard Thai (Bangkok) is the national language, but Northern Thai (Kham Mueang), Isan (closely related to Lao), and Southern Thai are distinct dialect clusters with different vowel systems and tonal patterns. A deaf person who lip-reads a Bangkok-speaking family member finds that a hearing relative from Chiang Mai or Khon Kaen speaks a different phonological profile.

Thai–English code-switching

  • Urban Bangkok Thai switches to English with no visual warning
  • In Bangkok and other major cities, educated Thai speakers regularly code-switch between Thai and English — English technical terms, brand names, and phrases inserted into Thai speech. For a deaf lip-reader, English words produced with Thai phonological influence add another visual category to navigate without any auditory cue to signal the language switch.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Thailand: a common condition with limited daily support

A 2024 hearing health survey of the Bangkok population found that hearing loss prevalence was 53.02%, and that moderate or greater hearing impairment affected 2.8% of participants — with adults aged 65 and over showing 8.56 times greater hearing loss than younger adults (PMC11015571). More than 2 million people in Thailand hold disability cards, and 18% of registered disabled people are hearing impaired — approximately 360,000 people with formally recognised hearing disability. Older adults are significantly less likely to seek hearing care, with a 2023 Frontiers in Digital Health study identifying strong attitudinal barriers including normalisation of hearing loss as a part of ageing and concerns about stigma (PMC10806058).

Thai Sign Language was acknowledged as the national language of deaf people in Thailand in August 1999, and the 2007 Persons with Disabilities Empowerment Act strengthened legal protections. Schools for deaf and hearing-disabled students have been established across Thailand's regions. Despite these structural steps, daily life for a deaf or hard of hearing Thai person who lives with hearing family members remains largely unaided — sign language interpretation is not available at family meals, in workplaces, or at social gatherings. The formal accessibility framework stops well short of the informal settings where most communication happens.

An earlier national cohort study of 87,134 adults found that approximately 8.5% reported some trouble hearing (PMC3529921). Thailand's population is ageing rapidly — the share of people over 60 is growing faster than most East and Southeast Asian neighbours — and age-related hearing loss is concentrated in exactly this group. As multi-generational Thai families increasingly include elderly members with significant hearing loss, the communication gap at family tables grows. Captio AI captions natural Thai speech in real time, at a Songkran table in Bangkok or a family meal in Chiang Mai, so a deaf family member reads what their hearing relatives are saying.

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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

"Bangkok Thai is fast and tonal — the meaning is in the pitch, which I cannot hear at all. Captio AI reads what my husband says correctly, tones included. I follow our conversations without asking him to write things down between us."

Nittaya S. 🇹🇭
nittaya.s***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, hearing husband speaks Bangkok Thai, Bangkok

"Northern Thai sounds different from Bangkok Thai — different vowels, different feel. Captio AI handles my family's Northern Thai accurately and I follow the table at family gatherings instead of nodding along."

Kritsada M. 🇹🇭
kritsada.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Northern Thai (Kham Mueang), Chiang Mai

"Office Thai in Bangkok is full of English terms. Captio AI captions both languages in the same stream and I follow what my colleagues are saying without asking for written summaries afterwards."

Supaporn L. 🇹🇭
supaporn.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues speak standard Thai mixed with English, Bangkok

"My children speak very fast and drop into Isan patterns sometimes. Captio AI reads their speech accurately and I understand them without asking them to slow down or face me when they talk."

Somchai P. 🇹🇭
somchai.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 63, hearing children speak fast modern Thai, Khon Kaen

"Bangkok Thai is fast and tonal — the meaning is in the pitch, which I cannot hear at all. Captio AI reads what my husband says correctly, tones included. I follow our conversations without asking him to write things down between us."

Nittaya S. 🇹🇭
nittaya.s***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, hearing husband speaks Bangkok Thai, Bangkok

"Northern Thai sounds different from Bangkok Thai — different vowels, different feel. Captio AI handles my family's Northern Thai accurately and I follow the table at family gatherings instead of nodding along."

Kritsada M. 🇹🇭
kritsada.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Northern Thai (Kham Mueang), Chiang Mai

"Office Thai in Bangkok is full of English terms. Captio AI captions both languages in the same stream and I follow what my colleagues are saying without asking for written summaries afterwards."

Supaporn L. 🇹🇭
supaporn.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues speak standard Thai mixed with English, Bangkok

"My children speak very fast and drop into Isan patterns sometimes. Captio AI reads their speech accurately and I understand them without asking them to slow down or face me when they talk."

Somchai P. 🇹🇭
somchai.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 63, hearing children speak fast modern Thai, Khon Kaen

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Thai.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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