Portuguese live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

Brazil has 2.3 million people with extreme hearing difficulty — unable to hear at all or able to hear only loud sounds — according to IBGE's 2019 National Health Survey (PNS). A further significant portion of the population lives with partial hearing loss, with self-reported prevalence of hearing loss estimated at 5.2% of adults overall and 30.4% among older adults. For deaf Brazilians, exclusion from daily life is not hypothetical: it is the padaria counter where the attendant doesn't slow down, the family churrasco where everyone talks at once, the bus ride where the driver's instructions cannot be followed.

Brazil recognised Libras in 2002 (Law 10.436), but everyday implementation outside institutional settings remains minimal. Street vendors, family kitchens, bakery counters, and bus conversations have no Libras accommodation and no legal obligation to provide one. Research on access to health services among deaf Brazilians consistently shows that communication barriers persist even in formal healthcare settings — in informal daily settings, the barriers are total.

Brazil's ageing population and high rates of noise-induced hearing loss — driven by dense urban environments and industrial noise — mean the deaf and hard of hearing population is growing. The gap between the scale of the problem and the daily-life infrastructure to support it is widening every year. Captio AI captions Brazilian Portuguese in real time — including fast gíria-heavy speech, nasal vowel-dense casual registers, and the regional varieties of São Paulo, Rio, and the Northeast — so the padaria, the churrasco, and the bus are no longer settings you have to navigate alone.