English live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

In the United States alone, 37.5 million adults report some trouble hearing — approximately 15% of the adult population — with around 11 million experiencing serious hearing difficulty, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. In the UK, updated 2024 estimates using census data now place the figure at 18 million adults with some degree of hearing loss. Across English-speaking countries, this is one of the largest deaf and hard of hearing populations in the world. Exclusion from ordinary life looks like a family dinner where everyone else caught the joke, a checkout counter where the question had to be asked three times, a workplace hallway where the informal conversation was never accessible.

English-speaking countries have legal accessibility frameworks — the ADA in the United States, the Equality Act in the UK — but these apply to formal institutional settings. Workplaces and hospitals sometimes comply; the coffee shop, the pub, the family kitchen, and the bus stop never do. A 2024 study found that 41% of US mental health facilities were non-compliant with sign language interpreter requirements despite federal law. If formal institutions fail at this rate, informal everyday settings have no obligation and no mechanism at all.

Global hearing loss is projected by the WHO to reach 2.5 billion people by 2050, with English-speaking countries ageing faster than average. The number of people navigating daily English life without sound is growing. The infrastructure to support them in the informal, unstructured settings that make up most of daily existence is not keeping pace. Captio AI captions English speech in real time — including fast speech, regional accents, and noisy settings — so the grocery counter, the office hallway, and the family table are no longer settings you have to navigate alone.