Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Telugu 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

Government hospital visits at district or area hospitals in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where OPD queues are long and consultation time is under five minutes.

🔬Specialist consultations

Specialist consultations at major public hospitals in Hyderabad or Vijayawada, where medical terminology is dense and clinical pace is fast.

💊Pharmacy conversations

Pharmacy consultations at a medical shop, where the pharmacist explains dosage and timing quickly in Telugu mixed with English drug names.

🦷Dental appointments

Dental appointments, where the dentist continues speaking during the procedure and the patient cannot turn to lip-read.

🧠Mental health sessions

Mental health consultations, where follow-up questions come frequently and tone and nuance carry clinical weight.

🚑Emergency and urgent care

Private clinic visits in smaller towns like Warangal, Guntur, or Tirupati, where the regional accent may differ from what the patient is used to.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Telugu
91.8%

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.

Telugu

Why Telugu is hard to understand

Aspiration invisible on lips

  • Aspirated and plain consonants look identical
  • Telugu distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated consonants across four stop categories. The aspiration — a burst of air following the consonant — is purely acoustic and invisible at the lip level. When a doctor names a drug or describes a procedure, a deaf patient watching the lips cannot tell apart minimal pairs that differ only in aspiration.

Formal vs colloquial gap

  • Written Telugu and spoken Telugu sound completely different
  • Telugu has a large diglossia gap between its classical written form (grandhandam) and the colloquial spoken language. Medical reports, prescription labels, and formal clinical announcements use a register that sounds different from the conversational Telugu a doctor uses to explain a diagnosis. Deaf patients must navigate both registers in a single appointment.

Andhra vs Telangana split

  • Regional accents shift significantly between states
  • The division of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014 solidified two distinct regional varieties of Telugu. Telangana Telugu is influenced by Urdu and Dakhini, while coastal Andhra Telugu has different vowel qualities and intonation. A deaf patient from Hyderabad attending a clinic in Visakhapatnam encounters speech that sounds measurably different.

Telugu–English code-switch

  • Doctors embed English medical terms without transition
  • Urban Telugu-speaking doctors routinely insert English terms — 'BP', 'ECG', 'injection', 'sugar' (for diabetes) — into Telugu sentences. A deaf patient following Telugu lip movements is abruptly presented with English phoneme patterns and a different syllable rhythm, mid-sentence and without signal.

Retroflex consonants

  • Tongue position invisible in retroflex-heavy speech
  • Telugu has a rich retroflex consonant inventory — sounds where the tongue curls back to the palate. These retroflex-to-dental distinctions are invisible on the lips. Medical words that differ only in retroflex versus dental consonants are indistinguishable by sight alone.

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The Challenge

1 in 23 people in Telangana. A healthcare system with no interpreter mandate.

A population-based prevalence study conducted in Mahabubnagar district, Telangana found that disabling hearing impairment affects approximately 1 in 23 people overall, and one in three people aged over 65. Applied to the combined population of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — approximately 91 million people — these figures suggest millions of Telugu-speaking people navigating daily life with significant hearing loss. Nationally, WHO estimates put the figure at 63 million across India with significant auditory impairment.

India has no statutory requirement for hospitals to provide sign language interpreters. Indian Sign Language (ISL) was formally recognised in 2023, but implementation in healthcare settings is in its earliest stages. The National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness (NPPCD) runs screening camps in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, but the programme focuses on detection and hearing aid provision, not on ensuring communication accessibility inside the clinical encounter. Hearing aids themselves present a barrier: device costs, maintenance, and power supply remain inaccessible for many rural families.

For working-age Telugu speakers with hearing loss, the disability carries an employment cost that compounds the healthcare gap. A 2011 census found that 73.9% of Indians aged 15–59 with hearing disability were only marginal workers. A patient who cannot follow a doctor's instructions about medication dosage, referral appointments, or lifestyle changes faces both health and economic consequences that the healthcare system is not currently equipped to prevent.

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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

"The specialist at Gandhi Hospital speaks Telangana Telugu mixed with English medicine names. I was missing most of it. Now I place my phone on the consultation table and read everything in real time. First time I left a hospital appointment fully understanding my diagnosis."

Srinivasa Rao Venkata 🇮🇳
srinivasarao.v***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss, Hyderabad, Telangana

"The pharmacist at the medical shop speaks Andhra Telugu very fast. I used to bring my son to translate. Now I hold Captio AI near the counter and read the dosage instructions myself. I don't need to involve my family anymore."

Lakshmi Devi Reddy 🇮🇳
lakshmi.r***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh

"My doctor speaks Telangana Telugu which is different from what I learned in school. The Urdu-influenced words for medications confuse my lip-reading. Captio AI handles all of it — I finally know what I'm prescribed."

Ravi Kumar Naidu 🇮🇳
ravi.n***@gmail.com
Congenital hearing loss, Warangal, Telangana

"At the private clinic in Tirupati the doctor switches from formal Telugu to English in the same sentence. Captio AI captions the switch without any interruption. I saved the transcript and confirmed my BP medication before taking it."

Anitha Subramaniam 🇮🇳
anitha.s***@gmail.com
Mild bilateral hearing loss, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh

"The specialist at Gandhi Hospital speaks Telangana Telugu mixed with English medicine names. I was missing most of it. Now I place my phone on the consultation table and read everything in real time. First time I left a hospital appointment fully understanding my diagnosis."

Srinivasa Rao Venkata 🇮🇳
srinivasarao.v***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss, Hyderabad, Telangana

"The pharmacist at the medical shop speaks Andhra Telugu very fast. I used to bring my son to translate. Now I hold Captio AI near the counter and read the dosage instructions myself. I don't need to involve my family anymore."

Lakshmi Devi Reddy 🇮🇳
lakshmi.r***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh

"My doctor speaks Telangana Telugu which is different from what I learned in school. The Urdu-influenced words for medications confuse my lip-reading. Captio AI handles all of it — I finally know what I'm prescribed."

Ravi Kumar Naidu 🇮🇳
ravi.n***@gmail.com
Congenital hearing loss, Warangal, Telangana

"At the private clinic in Tirupati the doctor switches from formal Telugu to English in the same sentence. Captio AI captions the switch without any interruption. I saved the transcript and confirmed my BP medication before taking it."

Anitha Subramaniam 🇮🇳
anitha.s***@gmail.com
Mild bilateral hearing loss, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Understand your diagnosis in Telugu.

Captio AI is free to start

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