Italian live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

Italy has approximately 3.5 million people with some form of hearing loss and around 70,000 who are severely deaf, according to European Review epidemiological data. LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana) was officially recognised as an official language of Italy only in 2021 — making Italy one of the last major Western European countries to do so. For deaf Italians, exclusion from ordinary daily life is concrete: the bar counter where the exchange is too fast to follow, the family Sunday lunch where grandparents speak Neapolitan dialect and younger members speak Roman-inflected Italian, the piazza gathering where overlapping voices and gesture carry the social meaning.

Italy's Italian Deaf Community at the Time of Coronavirus study (published in Frontiers in Society, 2021) documented the profound communication isolation experienced by deaf Italians when visual communication signals were blocked by masks — but the paper also highlighted the pre-existing baseline of daily-life inaccessibility that the pandemic simply made visible. LIS interpreters are primarily concentrated in formal institutional contexts. For informal daily settings — the bar, the market, the piazza, the family table — there is no interpreter and no legal infrastructure to demand one.

Italy's ageing population — one of the oldest in Europe — is driving an increase in hearing loss prevalence. The WHO's EHIMA 2024 European hearing loss report documents growing unmet hearing care need across Italy. Captio AI captions Italian speech in real time — including fast colloquial speech, regional dialect-inflected Italian, and the multi-generational register variation of Italian family life — so the bar counter, the family lunch, and the piazza are no longer settings you have to navigate alone.