Italian live captions and productivity tool for doctor appointments
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Italian doctor appointments
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Italian speakers.
Follow what the doctor says in real time
- Captions appear word by word as they speak
- Handles medical terminology, drug names, and clinical language
- Place the phone on the desk — no setup needed
- Works in any consultation room, clinic, or hospital setting
When the doctor speaks another language
- Captions and translates in real time
- Follow your diagnosis in the language you understand best
- 60+ languages, no manual switching
- For foreign specialists, travel, or immigration settings
A full record of the consultation
- Record the appointment and upload it for a complete transcript
- Review instructions, drug names, and follow-up steps at home
- Share with a family member or carer if needed
- Works on any consultation recording
Key instructions extracted automatically
- Diagnosis, medication, and follow-up steps pulled from any transcript
- Organised into clear sections
- Nothing important missed or forgotten
- Works on any saved appointment recording
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Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Medico di base (GP) appointments in Italy, where the 15-minute slot moves quickly and the doctor types while speaking.
Specialist consultations at a policlinico or ospedale regionale, where medical terminology is dense and clinical pace is fast.
Farmacia counter consultations, where the pharmacist explains dosage instructions quickly in Italian.
Dental appointments, where the dentist continues to speak during treatment and the patient cannot turn to face them.
Psychiatry or psychotherapy consultations, where nuance and follow-up questions are central to the session.
Pronto soccorso (emergency room) visits, where staff communicate rapidly in a noisy environment.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
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Built for the conversations where every word matters
Captions as the doctor speaks
Words appear on screen while the doctor is still talking. You read the diagnosis, drug name, or follow-up instruction at the same moment it is said — not after they have moved on.
Medical terminology handled accurately
Drug names, procedure names, clinical terms. Captio AI handles the vocabulary of a real consultation — not just everyday speech.
Review the appointment after
Record the consultation and upload it to Audio Transcription. Get a full written record of everything said — instructions, dosages, referrals — to review at home and share with a carer if needed.
Works in any clinical setting
Consultation rooms, hospital wards, A&E, dental chairs, pharmacy counters. Place the phone near the speaker and Captio AI captions whoever is talking.
Any language
For foreign-language doctors, specialists abroad, or appointments through an interpreter. Live Translator captions and translates in real time so you follow your diagnosis in the language you understand best.
100% private
Medical conversations are among the most sensitive there are. Captio AI processes audio in real time and discards it immediately. Nothing is recorded, stored, or shared.
Why Italian is hard to understand
Geminate consonants invisible
- Double consonants are an acoustic difference only
- Italian distinguishes single and double (geminate) consonants — the difference between 'fatto' and 'fato', 'palla' and 'pala' — that changes word meaning. But geminates are encoded entirely in duration: the mouth holds a position for longer rather than moving differently. A deaf patient watching a doctor's lips cannot see the difference between a single and double consonant, yet the distinction may change the meaning of a medication instruction or a diagnosis.
Extreme dialect diversity
- Italian dialects can sound like different languages
- Italy's regional dialects — Venetian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Milanese — are not merely accents but historically separate Italo-Romance languages, still present in daily speech. A doctor from Palermo speaks very differently from one in Venice or Bergamo. A deaf patient who has learned to read Standard Italian lips encounters entirely different lip patterns in the clinical speech of doctors from different regions.
Word boundary blur
- Italian prosody runs words together
- Italian intonation naturally merges adjacent vowels across word boundaries (syntactic doubling, raddoppiamento fonosintattico). In fast clinical speech, phrase boundaries disappear, and a lip-reading patient cannot reliably identify where one instruction ends and another begins. A dosage instruction delivered as a continuous stream is much harder to parse than the same words said deliberately.
Latin medical register
- Clinical Italian uses Latin-origin terminology unfamiliar to lay speakers
- Italian medical language is heavily Latin-derived and sounds different from everyday Italian. Terms like 'ipertensione', 'cardiopatia', 'gastropatia' use prefixes and suffixes from Latin medical tradition. A deaf patient reading everyday Italian lips must learn a different visual vocabulary for the clinical consultation.
Regional accent in clinical settings
- Standard Italian is spoken differently across 20 regions
- Even speakers who use grammatically standard Italian carry strong regional phonological features — a Neapolitan intonation contour, Venetian vowel qualities, Tuscan spirantization of intervocalic stops. In a country where many doctors are regionally trained and remain in their home region, a deaf patient encounters a different set of lip patterns depending on where in Italy they are.
Download for free
Download on theApp Store3.5 million Italians with hearing loss. A sign language recognised in law only in 2021.
Approximately 3.5 million Italians — about 6% of the population — live with some form of hearing loss, with around 70,000 profoundly deaf. Italian Sign Language (Lingua dei Segni Italiana, LIS) was legally recognised only in 2021, making Italy a relatively late adopter among European nations. The recognition did not automatically create interpreter provision in healthcare settings: Italian hospitals and clinics are not required to provide LIS interpreters, and the availability of communication support for deaf and hard of hearing patients in clinical encounters varies widely by region and institution.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian deaf community faced acute communication failures. A 2020 study published in Frontiers in Sociology found that deaf and hard of hearing people in Italian hospitals were left without consistent means of communication with doctors and staff — masks eliminated lip-reading, which many deaf Italians rely on as a primary communication strategy, and sign language interpreters were rarely available. The structural gaps the pandemic revealed had in fact existed for decades.
Telemedicine presented a partial opportunity: a 2024 study in PMC found that telemedicine services could improve access for hearing-impaired patients in Italy, particularly in areas with poor interpreter availability. But digital access to telemedicine remains unequal, and rural Italian patients — already distant from specialist services — face compounded disadvantages. For the 3.5 million Italians with hearing loss, navigating the Italian healthcare system without systematic communication support remains the daily norm.
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 medico di base speaks Milanese-accented Italian and types while talking. I was missing half of the consultation. Captio AI transcribes everything in real time — I read the diagnosis and the medication instructions without asking my husband to come with me."
"My specialist at the Policlinico uses dense medical Italian with Latin terms I don't recognise on the lips. Captio AI handles the clinical vocabulary. For the first time I understood a cardiology consultation without a interpreter."
"The farmacista speaks fast and turns away to get the medicine. I could never hear the full dosage instructions. Now I hold Captio AI at the counter and read everything as she says it. No more guessing at how many tablets."
"The doctor in Venezia has a very strong Venetian accent. Standard Italian lip-reading didn't help me. Captio AI captured the accent without any problem. I understood my diabetes consultation for the first time without bringing anyone along."
"My medico di base speaks Milanese-accented Italian and types while talking. I was missing half of the consultation. Captio AI transcribes everything in real time — I read the diagnosis and the medication instructions without asking my husband to come with me."
"My specialist at the Policlinico uses dense medical Italian with Latin terms I don't recognise on the lips. Captio AI handles the clinical vocabulary. For the first time I understood a cardiology consultation without a interpreter."
"The farmacista speaks fast and turns away to get the medicine. I could never hear the full dosage instructions. Now I hold Captio AI at the counter and read everything as she says it. No more guessing at how many tablets."
"The doctor in Venezia has a very strong Venetian accent. Standard Italian lip-reading didn't help me. Captio AI captured the accent without any problem. I understood my diabetes consultation for the first time without bringing anyone along."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Understand your diagnosis in Italian.
Captio AI is free to start
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Download on theApp Store