Japanese live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

Japan has approximately 14.2 million people with any degree of hearing disability, according to the Japan Hearing Aid Industry Association — a figure driven in large part by Japan having one of the world's oldest populations, with nearly 30% of citizens aged 65 or older. Around 360,000 people are Deaf or severely hard of hearing. For deaf people navigating Japanese daily life, exclusion happens not through overt hostility but through the structure of the language and society itself: the izakaya where the group conversation happens too fast to follow, the convenience store where the staff speak in scripted fast Japanese, the family dinner where register shifts signal social meaning that disappears without sound.

Japanese social norms create a particular barrier: asking someone to repeat, slow down, or write something is socially costly in a way that does not apply in Western cultures. Deaf people in Japan routinely absorb social situations without understanding them rather than create disruption by asking for accommodation. Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is used by approximately 70,000 people but is not widely understood outside the deaf community. For everyday informal settings — the konbini, the nomikai, the neighbourhood shop — there is no interpreter and no cultural expectation that one will be provided.

Japan's ageing population means the number of people navigating daily Japanese life with hearing loss is growing faster than in almost any other country. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare projects continued increase in age-related hearing loss through 2050, while accessibility infrastructure for everyday informal settings remains minimal. Captio AI captions Japanese speech in real time — including casual registers, keigo shifts, and the pitch-accent varieties of Tokyo and Kansai — so the izakaya, the convenience store counter, and the family dinner are no longer settings you have to navigate alone.