Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Tagalog 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

At a barangay health center or private clinic in Metro Manila, the doctor explains a diagnosis switching between Tagalog and English. Captio AI captions every word in real time so you follow the full picture.

🔬Specialist consultations

At a specialist consultation at Philippine General Hospital or a private referral clinic, medical terminology arrives in English while explanations follow in Tagalog. Captio AI keeps pace with the switch.

💊Pharmacy conversations

At the pharmacy counter in a Mercury Drug or a local botika, the pharmacist explains dosage instructions in rapid Tagalog. Point your phone toward them and read the instructions as they speak.

🦷Dental appointments

At the dentist's clinic, instructions like 'huwag kumain ng malamig' arrive between procedures when you cannot see the dentist's face at all. Captio AI captions from audio alone.

🧠Mental health sessions

In a mental health session at a government hospital or private clinic, your therapist covers sensitive ground in a mix of Filipino and English. Captio AI captions the full session so you engage on equal terms.

🚑Emergency and urgent care

In an emergency room at Makati Medical Center or a provincial hospital, triage staff and nurses speak quickly under pressure. Open Captio AI and read their instructions in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Tagalog
89.2%

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.

Tagalog

Why Tagalog is hard to understand

Taglish code-switching

  • Tagalog and English switch mid-sentence
  • Filipino doctors routinely shift between Tagalog and English within a single utterance — naming a diagnosis in English, then explaining it in Tagalog. For a deaf or hard of hearing patient, tracking which language is active and reading lips across that shift is nearly impossible without text.

Glottal stop invisibility

  • Glottal stops disappear on the lips
  • Tagalog uses a phonemic glottal stop that distinguishes meaning — 'bata' (robe) from 'batà' (child) — but it produces no visible lip movement. A deaf patient watching a speaker's face cannot detect the glottal stop that changes the word entirely.

Dialect accent variation

  • Regional accents reshape familiar words
  • Tagalog is a second language for many Filipinos whose first language is Cebuano, Ilocano, or Hiligaynon. Medical staff from Visayas or the Cordillera speak Tagalog with phonological patterns from their home language, making the same medical vocabulary sound different on different lips.

Stress phonemics

  • Word stress changes meaning invisibly
  • In Tagalog, stress is phonemic: 'aso' (dog) vs 'asó' (smoke). In clinical speech, a mispronounced stress by a doctor or a stress the deaf patient cannot detect can flip the meaning of a medical instruction entirely.

Fast casual reduction

  • Informal registers drop and elide sounds
  • In informal consultations, Tagalog speakers reduce unstressed syllables and drop intervocalic sounds. 'Mayroon ka ba' becomes 'meron ka ba' and further compressed in fast speech. A deaf patient following lip shapes is following a moving target that shortens with conversational speed.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in the Philippines: scale and gaps

The Philippines carries a disproportionately high burden of hearing loss relative to high-income countries. A national survey published in 2020 found that 15% of the Philippine population has moderate or worse hearing loss in the better ear — a rate that reaches 49.1% in adults over 65. The same study found higher proportions of severe to profound hearing loss than reported in most high-income countries, driven by middle ear disease, low-income access to care, and inadequate newborn screening infrastructure. People with disabilities in the Philippines score significantly lower on well-being and report reduced access to health services, employment, and government welfare programmes.

At the community level, the burden falls unevenly. Socioeconomic status is independently associated with greater risk of hearing loss, meaning people in barangays with the least healthcare access are simultaneously the most likely to have unaddressed hearing impairment and the least likely to reach a specialist. Filipino Sign Language (FSL) was formally recognised under the Filipino Sign Language Act of 2018, but interpreter availability outside Metro Manila remains limited. Deaf Filipinos navigating healthcare appointments routinely do so without access to a qualified FSL interpreter.

For the estimated 121,000 deaf Filipinos who use FSL, a medical appointment in the provincial public health system often means relying on a family member to interpret — a process that filters, abbreviates, and sometimes omits clinical information. Doctors pressed for time in under-resourced clinics cannot slow down for an informal interpreter chain. The result is a structural communication failure at the exact point where accuracy matters most: diagnosis, dosage, and follow-up care. Captio AI captions Tagalog and English in real time at a barangay health center or referral hospital, so every instruction from the doctor arrives in the patient's own hands.

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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 switches between Tagalog and English mid-sentence at Philippine Heart Center. I could never follow which language was coming next. Captio AI captions everything as it arrives — I finally understood my own medication schedule without asking my daughter to repeat it."

Marites Salazar 🇵🇭
marites.s***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss since childhood, Quezon City, Metro Manila

"The doctor at Cebu Doctors' University Hospital has a Bisaya accent when speaking Tagalog — very different from Metro Manila Tagalog. I never understood the stress patterns. Captio AI captures the audio and I read it without guessing what word was meant."

Renato Villanueva 🇵🇭
renato.v***@gmail.com
Profound deafness, uses hearing aid, Cebu City

"At my endocrinology appointment, the nurse rattled off dosage instructions so fast in Tagalog. I held up my phone and read the captions. For the first time I left a clinic knowing exactly what I was supposed to take."

Lourdes Reyes 🇵🇭
lourdes.r***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Davao City

"The dental clinic plays loud music and the dentist speaks with instruments in her hands. I cannot lip-read at all. Captio AI captions from the audio — I knew what she was telling me even when her face was turned away."

Eduardo Santos 🇵🇭
eduardo.s***@gmail.com
Bilateral hearing loss, Manila

"My cardiologist switches between Tagalog and English mid-sentence at Philippine Heart Center. I could never follow which language was coming next. Captio AI captions everything as it arrives — I finally understood my own medication schedule without asking my daughter to repeat it."

Marites Salazar 🇵🇭
marites.s***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss since childhood, Quezon City, Metro Manila

"The doctor at Cebu Doctors' University Hospital has a Bisaya accent when speaking Tagalog — very different from Metro Manila Tagalog. I never understood the stress patterns. Captio AI captures the audio and I read it without guessing what word was meant."

Renato Villanueva 🇵🇭
renato.v***@gmail.com
Profound deafness, uses hearing aid, Cebu City

"At my endocrinology appointment, the nurse rattled off dosage instructions so fast in Tagalog. I held up my phone and read the captions. For the first time I left a clinic knowing exactly what I was supposed to take."

Lourdes Reyes 🇵🇭
lourdes.r***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Davao City

"The dental clinic plays loud music and the dentist speaks with instruments in her hands. I cannot lip-read at all. Captio AI captions from the audio — I knew what she was telling me even when her face was turned away."

Eduardo Santos 🇵🇭
eduardo.s***@gmail.com
Bilateral hearing loss, Manila

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Understand your diagnosis in Tagalog.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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