Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Persian live captions and productivity tool for doctor appointments

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🩺GP and primary care visits

GP visits at a درمانگاه (darmangah) or private clinic, where the doctor speaks through a brief appointment looking at the computer screen and switching between formal clinical Persian and colloquial speech.

🔬Specialist consultations

Specialist consultations at a بیمارستان (bimarestan) or polyclinic, where Arabic-derived clinical vocabulary is dense and the appointment ends before the patient has absorbed every instruction.

💊Pharmacy conversations

Pharmacy consultations at a داروخانه (daroukhane), where the pharmacist explains dosage and interactions across a counter — often behind glass, often quietly.

🦷Dental appointments

Dental appointments where the dentist explains the treatment plan between procedures and gives aftercare instructions that must be followed precisely.

🧠Mental health sessions

Mental health consultations with a روانپزشک (ravan-pezeshk) or psychologist, where nuance in every clinical exchange carries direct weight.

🚑Emergency and urgent care

Emergency room visits at an اورژانس (urzhanss), where staff speak fast, masks are common, and clear communication about symptoms and treatment is immediate and critical.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Persian
89.1%

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

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.

Persian

Why Persian is hard to understand

Pharyngeal invisibility

  • Persian produces many sounds deep in the throat
  • Persian has pharyngeal and uvular consonants — the ع (/ʕ/), ح (/ħ/), and ق (/q/) sounds — produced far back in the throat and completely invisible on the lips. These appear throughout the Arabic medical loanwords Iranian doctors use daily. A deaf patient lip-reading cannot distinguish words that differ only by a pharyngeal vs glottal consonant — yet in a dosage instruction or a diagnosis, that distinction changes the word entirely.

Short vowel reduction

  • Colloquial Persian drops the vowels that distinguish clinical words
  • Standard literary Persian has six vowels; colloquial Tehrani speech reduces short vowels heavily, compresses syllables, and drops unstressed sounds. A doctor speaking casually during a rushed appointment — one hand on the keyboard, eyes on the screen — produces output where vowel cues a deaf patient might catch in careful speech are gone entirely.

Arabic medical register

  • Iranian clinical vocabulary is heavily Arabic-derived
  • Medical terms in Iran are predominantly borrowed from Arabic — قلب (heart), کبد (liver), رحم (uterus). These words bear no phonological resemblance to their everyday Persian equivalents and follow Arabic consonantal patterns that include pharyngeals and emphatic consonants invisible on the lips. A deaf patient who learned Persian at home may not recognise the clinical name for a condition they know perfectly well in everyday language.

Formal-colloquial gap

  • Doctors shift between clinical and colloquial Persian mid-consultation
  • Formal written Persian and colloquial Tehrani are phonologically very different. A doctor may open with formal clinical language then shift to informal Persian to explain a treatment plan simply. Each register shift carries different vowel patterns and different word choices — each of which requires a deaf patient to recalibrate their lip-reading in real time.

Regional accent variation

  • Persian-speaking doctors carry distinct regional phonological profiles
  • Doctors trained in Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, or Mashhad each carry a distinct phonological profile — different vowel realizations, consonant strength, and speech rate. A deaf patient calibrated to Tehrani Persian may struggle substantially with an Isfahani- or Tabrizi-accented clinician encountered through a referral.

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The Challenge

14% of Iranians with hearing impairment. A sign language the government has not yet recognised.

A population-based study of 6,521 residents of Tehran found that 14.27% had some degree of hearing impairment — with 4.58% classified as severe and 3.27% as profound. Iran's population is approaching 90 million; if this prevalence holds nationally, more than 12 million people live with significant hearing difficulty. A 2022 situation analysis of Iran's ear and hearing care programme, published in PMC, identified critical systemic gaps: insufficient specialist audiologists, inadequate screening, and no national strategy for communication support in clinical settings.

Despite Iran ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008, Iranian Sign Language has not been officially recognised by law. The Center for Human Rights in Iran has documented the gap between ratification and implementation, noting that deaf and hard of hearing Iranians cannot access health services independently due to the absence of qualified interpreters. A 2018 Human Rights Watch report documented discrimination and exclusion for people with disabilities in Iran, specifically including barriers to healthcare. Iran's deaf community has campaigned publicly — a 2018 gathering of 2,000 deaf Iranians at Tehran's Milad Tower called on the government to act — but recognition remained incomplete at time of research.

The COVID-19 pandemic made the consequence concrete: with masks mandatory in Iranian clinical settings and sign language interpreters absent, deaf Iranians lost access to health information at the moment it mattered most. Article 19 documented cases of deaf people in Iran being unable to access critical pandemic guidance. Captio AI captions Persian speech in real time — at the درمانگاه, the داروخانه, and the اورژانس — without requiring any interpreter or advance booking.

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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

"My cardiologist uses Arabic-derived clinical terms I cannot lip-read. I was leaving the بیمارستان guessing at my treatment plan. Captio AI gave me back the ability to read my own diagnosis as the doctor speaks it."

Fatemeh Ahmadi 🇮🇷
fatemeh.a***@gmail.com
Moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss, Tehran, Iran

"The pharmacist at the داروخانه speaks quietly and quickly. Instructions for my medication are verbal — nothing is written. Now I read every word as she says it. I have not missed a dosage instruction in months."

Reza Mohammadi 🇮🇷
reza.m***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since childhood, Isfahan, Iran

"My specialist speaks Khorasani-accented Persian. I was used to Tehran speech. The accent alone was enough to lose me. Captio AI captions in real time and I follow every accent variation."

Maryam Hosseini 🇮🇷
maryam.h***@gmail.com
Age-related bilateral hearing loss, Mashhad, Iran

"My psychiatrist speaks quickly in formal clinical Persian. The sessions matter too much to guess at. Captio AI captions every word and I follow the full consultation without reconstructing it afterwards."

Ali Karimi 🇮🇷
ali.k***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, hearing aid user, Shiraz, Iran

"My cardiologist uses Arabic-derived clinical terms I cannot lip-read. I was leaving the بیمارستان guessing at my treatment plan. Captio AI gave me back the ability to read my own diagnosis as the doctor speaks it."

Fatemeh Ahmadi 🇮🇷
fatemeh.a***@gmail.com
Moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss, Tehran, Iran

"The pharmacist at the داروخانه speaks quietly and quickly. Instructions for my medication are verbal — nothing is written. Now I read every word as she says it. I have not missed a dosage instruction in months."

Reza Mohammadi 🇮🇷
reza.m***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since childhood, Isfahan, Iran

"My specialist speaks Khorasani-accented Persian. I was used to Tehran speech. The accent alone was enough to lose me. Captio AI captions in real time and I follow every accent variation."

Maryam Hosseini 🇮🇷
maryam.h***@gmail.com
Age-related bilateral hearing loss, Mashhad, Iran

"My psychiatrist speaks quickly in formal clinical Persian. The sessions matter too much to guess at. Captio AI captions every word and I follow the full consultation without reconstructing it afterwards."

Ali Karimi 🇮🇷
ali.k***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, hearing aid user, Shiraz, Iran

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Understand your diagnosis in Persian.

Captio AI is free to start

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