Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Turkish 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

Turkish family meals — in Istanbul, Ankara, or Bursa, or a village home in Anatolia — are lively and often involve multiple people talking at once in whatever mix of formal and casual Turkish comes naturally. A hearing family member speaks at their normal pace. 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

Turkish workplaces mix formal Turkish for official exchanges and fast informal speech for corridor talk. A hearing colleague speaks in whichever register fits the moment. Captio AI captions everything so a deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows every quick question and desk conversation without interrupting the flow.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner is deaf or hard of hearing and Turkish is the language you speak at home. You talk naturally — the usual pace, the usual mix of formal and casual. Captio AI puts your words on their screen word by word so nothing is lost between you.

🏠Living together

Everyday home life in a Turkish household — calling across the apartment, talking over the evening news, 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 have to guess at.

🤝Introducing someone new

When a deaf or hard of hearing person meets a new hearing Turkish speaker — at a family visit, a neighbour's gathering, or a community event. Set up Captio AI and the first conversation starts naturally, without anyone needing to adjust how they speak.

👥Mixed group settings

Group settings — a family meal, a düğün gathering, 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 room is fully included in the conversation.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Turkish
91.1%

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.

Turkish

Why Turkish is hard to understand

Vowel harmony at speed

  • Suffix vowels that carry meaning reduce to nothing in fast Turkish
  • Turkish vowel harmony means vowels cascade predictably through suffixes — but in fast casual speech, unstressed suffix vowels reduce or merge, making them invisible at the lips. A deaf lip-reader following a hearing family member at normal conversational pace loses the morphological information — tense, case, politeness — that carries meaning.

Agglutinative suffix stacking

  • One Turkish word can carry a sentence's worth of meaning — all at once
  • Turkish words can accumulate many suffixes into a single long form: 'gidebileceklermiş' (apparently they may be able to go). In fast speech, these are delivered as one flowing phonological unit. The lips move through many positions in rapid succession — a deaf lip-reader sees a blur, not individual morphemes.

Istanbul vs. Anatolian dialect range

  • Anatolian Turkish uses different mouth shapes than Istanbul standard
  • Standard Turkish is based on Istanbul speech, but Anatolian dialects — Black Sea, Central Anatolia, Kurdish-influenced Southeastern Turkish — differ in vowel qualities and prosody. A deaf person lip-reading a hearing partner who speaks Black Sea Turkish encounters mouth shapes that don't match Standard Turkish norms.

Word-final cluster brevity

  • Turkish word endings disappear into the next word at conversational speed
  • In loanwords and fast speech, word-final consonant clusters (/nk/, /st/, /ks/) are brief and merge into the next word's onset, making word boundaries hard to locate. A deaf lip-reader cannot use auditory rhythm to find where one word ends — they rely on visual cues that collapse at sentence pace.

Kurdish–Turkish code-switching

  • Language switches mid-sentence with no visual warning signal
  • In cities like Diyarbakır and Gaziantep, many hearing speakers move naturally between Turkish and Kurdish. The phonological shift between languages mid-sentence is entirely auditory. A deaf lip-reader cannot track which language is active — the mouth shape changes without any visual warning signal.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Turkey: between policy progress and daily reality

Hearing loss affects millions of people in Turkey, with 3 per 1,000 babies born with permanent hearing impairment — a rate that drives Turkey's national early intervention programme, which targets cochlear implantation and hearing aid fitting before the age of six months. Data from military screening between 2009 and 2011 found that hearing loss was the second leading cause for young adult males to be rejected from service, with a prevalence of 3.71 per thousand (PMC3858951) — confirming that clinically significant hearing loss is a common condition well before old age. As the population ages and noise exposure accumulates, the total number of people with disabling hearing loss continues to grow.

Turkish Sign Language (TİD, Türk İşaret Dili) has legal recognition, and the government requires that at least one sign language interpreter be available in each province for access to public services. But the legal guarantee covers official interactions — not family conversations, workplaces, neighbourhoods, or social life. For a deaf or hard of hearing person in Turkey, the state's accessibility commitment ends at the door of the government office. At home, at a dinner table in Istanbul or at a family gathering in a smaller Anatolian city, the communication gap is entirely unaddressed by policy.

Istanbul concentrates the majority of deaf services — specialist schools, interpreter training, deaf community organisations — while Anatolian provinces have significantly less provision. For deaf and hard of hearing people in Black Sea cities, in Central Anatolia, and in the Kurdish-speaking Southeast, daily communication with hearing family members is a privately managed challenge with no institutional support. Captio AI captions natural Turkish speech in real time, giving a deaf family member access to the conversation happening around them — at a family dinner in Ankara or a gathering in Trabzon — without requiring the hearing person to change how they speak.

Download for free

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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

"Istanbul Turkish at normal pace was mostly invisible to me — the suffixes blur and the words run together. Captio AI reads what my husband actually says, at his actual speed. We stopped relying on writing things down between us."

Ayşe K. 🇹🇷
ayse.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband speaks fast casual Istanbul Turkish, Istanbul

"Black Sea Turkish has different vowels and a strong rhythm. My family gatherings were almost entirely lost to me. Captio AI reads their dialect correctly and I follow the conversation at the table for the first time."

Mehmet Y. 🇹🇷
mehmet.y***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Black Sea Turkish at gatherings, Trabzon

"Fast professional Turkish is full of long words — I was catching the first part and losing the rest. Captio AI captions the full word, the full sentence, in real time. I follow every meeting without asking for a summary afterwards."

Fatma C. 🇹🇷
fatma.c***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues speak Istanbul standard Turkish at work, Ankara

"My children mix Turkish and English in every sentence. I was lost in both. Captio AI handles the mixing naturally and I understand what they are actually saying — not just the Turkish parts but the whole thing."

Hüseyin D. 🇹🇷
huseyin.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 57, hearing children speak modern Turkish mixed with English, Izmir

"Istanbul Turkish at normal pace was mostly invisible to me — the suffixes blur and the words run together. Captio AI reads what my husband actually says, at his actual speed. We stopped relying on writing things down between us."

Ayşe K. 🇹🇷
ayse.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, hearing husband speaks fast casual Istanbul Turkish, Istanbul

"Black Sea Turkish has different vowels and a strong rhythm. My family gatherings were almost entirely lost to me. Captio AI reads their dialect correctly and I follow the conversation at the table for the first time."

Mehmet Y. 🇹🇷
mehmet.y***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing family speaks Black Sea Turkish at gatherings, Trabzon

"Fast professional Turkish is full of long words — I was catching the first part and losing the rest. Captio AI captions the full word, the full sentence, in real time. I follow every meeting without asking for a summary afterwards."

Fatma C. 🇹🇷
fatma.c***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues speak Istanbul standard Turkish at work, Ankara

"My children mix Turkish and English in every sentence. I was lost in both. Captio AI handles the mixing naturally and I understand what they are actually saying — not just the Turkish parts but the whole thing."

Hüseyin D. 🇹🇷
huseyin.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 57, hearing children speak modern Turkish mixed with English, Izmir

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Turkish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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