Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Polish 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 przychodnia or private clinic, where the doctor covers the presenting complaint, examination, and prescription in a brief appointment — often speaking quickly while writing.

🔬Specialist consultations

Specialist consultations at a szpital or poliklinika, where clinical Latin-derived vocabulary is dense and referrals may move a patient to a different city and regional dialect.

💊Pharmacy conversations

Pharmacy consultations at an apteka, where the pharmacist explains dosage, interactions, and storage conditions verbally — often behind glass.

🦷Dental appointments

Dental appointments where the dentist speaks mid-procedure and gives aftercare instructions verbally when treatment ends.

🧠Mental health sessions

Mental health consultations with a psychiatrist or psycholog, where every word of the clinical exchange carries weight that cannot be guessed.

🚑Emergency and urgent care

Emergency room visits at an SOR (Szpitalny Oddział Ratunkowy), where staff speak fast, environments are noisy, and clinical instructions are urgent.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Polish
94%

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.

Polish

Why Polish is hard to understand

Consonant cluster density

  • Polish consonant clusters are almost invisible on lips
  • Polish has extremely dense consonant clusters — szcz, prz, strz, chrz — that produce rapid bursts of sound compacted into almost no visible mouth movement. Clinical words like 'chrząstka' (cartilage), 'przełyk' (oesophagus), and 'skrzywienie' (curvature) are pure cluster-sound with minimal lip movement a deaf patient can read. Among European languages, Polish sits at the extreme end of the gap between what is heard and what is seen.

Dental-palatal invisibility

  • Polish's consonantal contrasts within the mouth are invisible
  • Polish distinguishes dental, alveolar, palatal, and retroflex consonant series — the sz/s, cz/c, ż/z, and dż/dz pairs that are minimal pairs sounding completely different but produced at articulatory positions invisible on the lips. In clinical vocabulary — drug names, anatomical terms, diagnostic categories — these contrasts distinguish words whose visual representation is identical.

Latin medical register

  • Clinical Polish uses Latin and Greek roots adapted to Polish phonology
  • Polish medical vocabulary draws heavily from Latin and Greek, but these words are adapted to Polish phonological rules — producing pronunciations unlike their international equivalents. 'Zapalenie płuc' (pneumonia) and 'niedokrwistość' (anaemia) follow Polish rules that a deaf patient may not associate with the conditions they know. Doctors switch between clinical Latin-derived terms and colloquial Polish equivalents mid-sentence without warning.

Regional dialect variation

  • Kashubian, Silesian, and Mazovian speech patterns affect individual doctors
  • While Standard Polish is the clinical norm, regional varieties — Kashubian influence in the north, Silesian patterns in the south — affect the pronunciation of individual doctors. A deaf patient used to Warsaw Polish encountering a clinician who grew up in Silesia or Kraków faces shifted vowels and different consonant realizations in the same clinical words.

Nasal vowel reduction

  • Polish nasal vowels reduce in fast speech and disappear on lips
  • Polish has two nasal vowels (ą, ę) that are phonemically distinctive — but in fast colloquial speech they frequently denasalise. A doctor speaking quickly while typing notes may produce output where the nasal quality that distinguishes a pair of words has been reduced to zero — with no visual cue remaining for a deaf patient.

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The Challenge

15% of Poles with hearing loss. A legal right to interpretation that arrived in 2012 — with implementation still catching up.

Approximately 15.1% of people in Poland report having hearing loss, according to national survey data — representing more than 5.7 million people in a country of 37.9 million. A study of Polish school-age children from rural areas found hearing screening positive results at 16.4%, with higher rates in younger children. Poland has an ageing population and an industrial history — noise-induced hearing loss from heavy industry, mining, and manufacturing has added to the baseline prevalence across working-age adults and retirees.

In 2011, Poland passed the Act on Sign Language and Other Means of Communication, legally recognising PJM (Polski Język Migowy) as a natural language and granting deaf individuals the right to access specialist services including sign language interpreters in healthcare facilities. Since 1 April 2012, public institutions have been mandated to provide access to PJM interpretation. In practice, deaf advocacy organisations consistently note that the legislation has not fully translated into reality — particularly in smaller cities and rural areas where interpreters are not available at short notice and hospital staff are rarely trained in deaf communication.

The gap is most acute in emergency situations. A deaf patient arriving at a regional SOR cannot pre-book an interpreter and cannot wait for one to arrive. The right to interpretation is a right on paper; in the moments when clinical communication matters most, it is not available in practice. Captio AI captions Polish speech in real time — at the przychodnia, the apteka, and the SOR — without requiring any advance arrangement.

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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 speaks quickly and uses dense clinical Polish. I was leaving the przychodnia with notes I had guessed at. Captio AI gives me real-time captions and I read my own diagnosis as the doctor speaks it."

Magdalena Kowalska 🇵🇱
magdalena.k***@gmail.com
Severe sensorineural hearing loss, Warsaw, Poland

"No interpreter was available at the SOR when I needed emergency care. I put Captio AI on the triage desk and a nurse spoke to the screen. First time I described my symptoms myself in a Polish emergency room."

Tomasz Wiśniewski 🇵🇱
tomasz.w***@gmail.com
Profound deafness since birth, PJM user, Kraków, Poland

"The apteka pharmacist gives interaction warnings quickly and assumes I heard. With Captio AI I read the instructions as she speaks and check anything unclear before I leave the counter."

Agnieszka Nowak 🇵🇱
agnieszka.n***@gmail.com
Moderate-to-severe bilateral hearing loss, Gdańsk, Poland

"My psychiatrist uses formal Polish vocabulary that moves fast. Sessions matter too much to miss. Captio AI captions every word and I take part in my own mental health care fully for the first time."

Piotr Zieliński 🇵🇱
piotr.z***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, hearing aid user, Wrocław, Poland

"My cardiologist speaks quickly and uses dense clinical Polish. I was leaving the przychodnia with notes I had guessed at. Captio AI gives me real-time captions and I read my own diagnosis as the doctor speaks it."

Magdalena Kowalska 🇵🇱
magdalena.k***@gmail.com
Severe sensorineural hearing loss, Warsaw, Poland

"No interpreter was available at the SOR when I needed emergency care. I put Captio AI on the triage desk and a nurse spoke to the screen. First time I described my symptoms myself in a Polish emergency room."

Tomasz Wiśniewski 🇵🇱
tomasz.w***@gmail.com
Profound deafness since birth, PJM user, Kraków, Poland

"The apteka pharmacist gives interaction warnings quickly and assumes I heard. With Captio AI I read the instructions as she speaks and check anything unclear before I leave the counter."

Agnieszka Nowak 🇵🇱
agnieszka.n***@gmail.com
Moderate-to-severe bilateral hearing loss, Gdańsk, Poland

"My psychiatrist uses formal Polish vocabulary that moves fast. Sessions matter too much to miss. Captio AI captions every word and I take part in my own mental health care fully for the first time."

Piotr Zieliński 🇵🇱
piotr.z***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, hearing aid user, Wrocław, Poland

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Understand your diagnosis in Polish.

Captio AI is free to start

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