Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Azerbaijani live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🏪Counter conversations

Pharmacy counter, supermarket checkout, poçt şöbəsi window, bank teller. Staff speak fast in Azerbaijani and move on. Captio AI shows what they said before the moment passes.

🍽️Group conversations

Family dinner, Novruz gathering, wedding celebration with extended family. Multiple generations, fast overlapping Azerbaijani, Russian sometimes mixing in. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

Getting a price at the bazaar, asking for directions in a new neighbourhood, chatting with a neighbour. People who speak at full conversational pace. Captio AI captions anyone near you.

Informal work moments

Çay break in the office, a quick question across the floor, chat before the meeting. The moments Azerbaijani workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Poliklinika reception, ASAN xidmət counter, bank branch, post office. Fast Azerbaijani, sometimes formal vocabulary, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

Metro announcements in Baku, avtobus driver, asking at a railway station. Situations where you need to understand the first time. Captio AI covers you anywhere.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Azerbaijani
92.1%

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 conversations that don't wait

Captions as they speak, not after

Captio AI shows each word as it is spoken. You read what the person is saying while they are still saying it — not after they have finished and moved on.

No lip reading needed

You do not need to face the speaker or position yourself to see their mouth. Captio AI picks up speech from any direction — across a counter, at a table, in a busy street.

Works through background noise

Restaurants, pharmacies, busy streets, crowded waiting rooms. Captio AI separates speech from background noise so captions stay accurate where everyday conversations actually happen.

Follows any conversation

One person or six. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking at any moment — so you follow the thread at a dinner table or keep up with a counter exchange without losing track.

Any accent, any pace

People do not slow down or enunciate for you. Captio AI handles fast talkers, regional accents, and casual speech — the way people actually talk in real life.

Any language, no setup

When someone speaks a language you do not know, switch to Live Translator. They speak their language — you read in yours. No configuration needed. Works in 60+ languages.

Azerbaijani

Why Azerbaijani is hard to understand

Unrecognised sign language

  • Azerbaijani Sign Language has no official status — at formal events, Russian Sign Language substitutes
  • Azerbaijani Sign Language (AİD) is the native language of Azerbaijan's approximately 31,000 deaf people, but it has no official recognition and no ISO language code. At international conferences and formal meetings, Russian Sign Language is used instead — leaving Azerbaijani deaf users without their own language in the spaces meant to include them.

Azerbaijani-Russian mixing

  • Everyday conversation in Azerbaijan switches between Azerbaijani and Russian
  • Azerbaijani urban daily life — at the bazaar, on public transport, in offices — involves constant code-switching between Azerbaijani and Russian. For a deaf or hard of hearing person attempting to lip-read, tracking two distinct phoneme systems simultaneously in an unpredictable pattern is effectively impossible.

Throat and back-of-mouth consonants

  • Azerbaijani sounds like q, x, and ğ are produced deep in the throat with no lip movement
  • Azerbaijani has several back-of-mouth and uvular consonants — q (uvular stop), x (velar fricative), ğ (voiced velar fricative) — that produce no visible lip movement. These sounds carry significant grammatical and lexical weight, meaning a lip-reader loses critical meaning even when they are tracking correctly.

Fast bazaar speech

  • Bazaar and teahouse conversation is rapid, informal, and vowel-reduced
  • The bazaar and çayxana (teahouse) are the social centres of Azerbaijani daily life. In these settings, speech is fast, informal, and heavy with reduced vowels and dropped endings — the farthest possible from the formal Azerbaijani taught in classrooms. A deaf person who has practiced lip-reading in formal settings is essentially starting over in these real-life environments.

Gender-separated social spaces

  • Traditional Azerbaijani hospitality separates men and women — deaf individuals may be cut off from conversations they need
  • Traditional Azerbaijani family and community gatherings often separate guests by gender. A deaf woman separated from the men's room where a key conversation is happening, or vice versa, has no way to follow what is being discussed — not because of hearing, but because of social structure.

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The Challenge

31,000 deaf Azerbaijanis with no officially recognised sign language. No captions at the bazaar, the çayxana, or the family gathering.

Approximately 31,000 deaf people live in Azerbaijan, according to the Joshua Project's people group data. Azerbaijani Sign Language — the language of this community — has no official recognition, no ISO code, and no protected status under Azerbaijani law. At formal international events, Russian Sign Language replaces it, effectively erasing the native language of Azerbaijan's deaf community. In daily life, from the bazaar to the neighborhood courtyard, deaf Azerbaijanis navigate a world where their language does not officially exist.

Two Republican Special Boarding Schools for deaf children provide structured education in Azerbaijan, but support ends at graduation. The daily life of a deaf Azerbaijani adult — running market errands, taking marshrutkas, receiving neighbours, navigating government counters — happens entirely without captioning, sign language interpretation, or any formal accessibility provision. Code-switching between Azerbaijani and Russian in urban settings adds another layer: a single conversation at a Baku bazaar or government office may require following two languages simultaneously.

A 2025 study published in PMC documented the development of the AzSLD (Azerbaijani Sign Language Dataset), noting that most existing NLP and speech tools in the region do not support Azerbaijani Sign Language or Azerbaijani speech recognition with any reliability. The gap between technological support for major European or Asian languages and for Azerbaijani is significant — and deaf Azerbaijanis bear the cost of that gap in every everyday interaction. Captio AI captions Azerbaijani speech in real time — including Azerbaijani-Russian code-switching — so the bazaar, the çayxana, and the family gathering are no longer conversations you have to navigate alone.

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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 bazaar in Baku is loud and fast — Azerbaijani and Russian switching constantly. Captio AI follows both. I do my own shopping now without needing my brother to come along."

Aynur H. 🇦🇿
aynur.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku

"The çayxana conversations in Ganja go fast and informal. Captio AI keeps up. I sit at the teahouse table now and actually follow what people are saying."

Fuad M. 🇦🇿
fuad.m***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Ganja

"Government offices were the worst — rapid Azerbaijani at the counter and nobody patient enough to repeat. Captio AI transcribes it instantly. I navigate them alone now."

Leyla R. 🇦🇿
leyla.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Sumqayit

"Family gatherings switch between formal and colloquial Azerbaijani and sometimes Russian. Captio AI catches it all. The family table is a place I actually participate in now."

Elçin K. 🇦🇿
elcin.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku

"The bazaar in Baku is loud and fast — Azerbaijani and Russian switching constantly. Captio AI follows both. I do my own shopping now without needing my brother to come along."

Aynur H. 🇦🇿
aynur.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku

"The çayxana conversations in Ganja go fast and informal. Captio AI keeps up. I sit at the teahouse table now and actually follow what people are saying."

Fuad M. 🇦🇿
fuad.m***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Ganja

"Government offices were the worst — rapid Azerbaijani at the counter and nobody patient enough to repeat. Captio AI transcribes it instantly. I navigate them alone now."

Leyla R. 🇦🇿
leyla.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Sumqayit

"Family gatherings switch between formal and colloquial Azerbaijani and sometimes Russian. Captio AI catches it all. The family table is a place I actually participate in now."

Elçin K. 🇦🇿
elcin.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Azerbaijani.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store