Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Ukrainian 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 поліклініка or family doctor's practice, where appointments are brief and the doctor may speak Surzhyk or a regional Ukrainian variety different from the patient's home dialect.

🔬Specialist consultations

Specialist consultations at a лікарня or specialist centre, where clinical Soviet-legacy terminology is dense and appointments move fast.

💊Pharmacy conversations

Pharmacy consultations at an аптека, where the pharmacist explains dosage and interactions verbally — with drug names potentially in Ukrainian, Russian, or English depending on the product.

🦷Dental appointments

Dental appointments where the dentist explains the treatment plan between procedures and gives aftercare instructions before the patient fully absorbs them.

🧠Mental health sessions

Mental health consultations with a психіатр or психолог, where precise understanding of each question and response carries direct clinical weight — and where displacement trauma makes the stakes especially high.

🚑Emergency and urgent care

Emergency room visits at a швидка допомога or hospital casualty, where staff speak fast in mixed language and the clinical information cannot wait.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Ukrainian
91.5%

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.

Ukrainian

Why Ukrainian is hard to understand

Surzhyk code-switching

  • East Ukrainian clinical settings often mix Ukrainian and Russian mid-sentence
  • Surzhyk — the Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech predominant in eastern and central Ukraine — is widely spoken by clinicians who grew up in Russian-dominant environments. A deaf patient calibrated to Standard Ukrainian encounters a doctor who alternates between Ukrainian grammar, Russian vocabulary, and mixed phonological patterns mid-sentence. Each switch requires a complete recalibration of the language being lip-read — and in a clinical setting, the missed word during recalibration may be the diagnosis.

Galician-Eastern divergence

  • Western and Eastern Ukrainian sound different on the lips
  • Ukrainian dialects diverge markedly between west and east. Western (Galician/Lviv) Ukrainian preserves older phonological forms, Polish-influenced vocabulary, and different prosody; Eastern Ukrainian is more influenced by Russian. A deaf patient who grew up in Lviv seeing a specialist in Kharkiv — or a displaced person following Russia's 2022 invasion — faces a phonological register substantially different from what they lip-read at home.

Palatal consonant clusters

  • Ukrainian consonant clusters create rapid bursts with little visible movement
  • Ukrainian uses extensive palatalisation — soft consonants formed high on the palate that produce sounds at articulation points invisible on the lips. Clinical words like 'вприскування' (injection) and 'стетоскоп' (stethoscope) involve consonant sequences where the visible distinction between alternative words is minimal.

Soviet medical register legacy

  • Ukrainian clinical settings still use Soviet-era Russian-derived medical terms
  • Ukrainian hospitals still frequently use medical terms derived from Soviet-era Russian rather than revived Ukrainian alternatives — terms for procedures, medications, and diagnoses may be Russian-origin words phonologically adapted to Ukrainian, or simply Russian words used unchanged. A deaf patient who learned Standard Ukrainian medical vocabulary may not recognise the Soviet-legacy term a doctor uses.

War displacement variation

  • Displaced patients and doctors bring new regional phonological variation into the clinic
  • Since 2022, millions of Ukrainians have been displaced internally and across Europe. Clinical settings in Lviv, Warsaw, Berlin, and London now see patients and doctors whose phonological profiles span all regions. A deaf patient navigating healthcare in displacement faces not only the clinical language barrier but also uncertainty about which Ukrainian variety the clinician in front of them speaks.

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The Challenge

2 million with hearing impairment in Ukraine. A community the war has made more vulnerable than ever.

Before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine was estimated to have more than 2 million people with hearing impairment, of whom approximately 31,000 lived with complete hearing loss and around 400,000 communicated primarily through Ukrainian Sign Language. The Ukrainian Society of the Deaf served as the central advocacy body for this community. The healthcare infrastructure available to deaf Ukrainians — already inadequate by European standards, with an aspirational rather than operational system of sign language interpretation — was severely disrupted by the invasion.

Ukrainian Sign Language itself has a contested history. It developed in the Soviet era as a pan-Soviet language, and the transition to a distinctly Ukrainian variety has been incomplete — deaf Ukrainians in different regions continue to use varieties shaped by Soviet standardisation, creating a fragmented linguistic landscape for a community already underserved. A 2023 report documented that most schools for the deaf in Ukraine continue to emphasise oral Ukrainian proficiency over sign language, leaving many deaf graduates dependent on lip-reading and written communication in clinical settings.

The war created immediate life-safety risks — air raid sirens are audio-only, and deaf people in affected regions could not hear warnings to take shelter. The humanitarian consequences extend to healthcare: displaced deaf Ukrainians in Polish, German, and Czech hospitals face clinical settings where neither the language nor the communication support is familiar. Captio AI captions Ukrainian in real time — at the поліклініка in Kyiv, the лікарня in Lviv, or an urgent care clinic anywhere a Ukrainian-speaking patient now lives.

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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 doctor speaks Surzhyk — Ukrainian mixed with Russian — and I was calibrated to Standard Ukrainian. I was missing every other sentence. Captio AI captions the mix in real time and I follow my own consultation."

Oksana Petrenko 🇺🇦
oksana.p***@gmail.com
Severe sensorineural hearing loss, Kyiv, Ukraine

"No interpreter has been available at my hospital since 2022. I put Captio AI on the desk and the doctor speaks to the screen. First hospital visit I understood my own diagnosis without guessing."

Mykola Kovalenko 🇺🇦
mykola.k***@gmail.com
Profound deafness, Ukrainian Sign Language user, Lviv, Ukraine

"I am displaced in Germany and see Ukrainian-speaking doctors through a community clinic. The doctor speaks Eastern Ukrainian, I was raised on Galician. Captio AI bridges the gap — I follow the appointment fully."

Iryna Savchenko 🇩🇪
iryna.s***@gmail.com
Moderate bilateral hearing loss, Berlin, Germany (displaced from Kharkiv)

"My psychiatrist uses Soviet clinical terms. Captio AI captions the session and I can focus on what we are discussing instead of trying to reconstruct vocabulary I don't recognise."

Taras Melnyk 🇺🇦
taras.m***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Odesa, Ukraine

"My doctor speaks Surzhyk — Ukrainian mixed with Russian — and I was calibrated to Standard Ukrainian. I was missing every other sentence. Captio AI captions the mix in real time and I follow my own consultation."

Oksana Petrenko 🇺🇦
oksana.p***@gmail.com
Severe sensorineural hearing loss, Kyiv, Ukraine

"No interpreter has been available at my hospital since 2022. I put Captio AI on the desk and the doctor speaks to the screen. First hospital visit I understood my own diagnosis without guessing."

Mykola Kovalenko 🇺🇦
mykola.k***@gmail.com
Profound deafness, Ukrainian Sign Language user, Lviv, Ukraine

"I am displaced in Germany and see Ukrainian-speaking doctors through a community clinic. The doctor speaks Eastern Ukrainian, I was raised on Galician. Captio AI bridges the gap — I follow the appointment fully."

Iryna Savchenko 🇩🇪
iryna.s***@gmail.com
Moderate bilateral hearing loss, Berlin, Germany (displaced from Kharkiv)

"My psychiatrist uses Soviet clinical terms. Captio AI captions the session and I can focus on what we are discussing instead of trying to reconstruct vocabulary I don't recognise."

Taras Melnyk 🇺🇦
taras.m***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Odesa, Ukraine

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Understand your diagnosis in Ukrainian.

Captio AI is free to start

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