Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Punjabi live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🏪Counter conversations

Local chemist, ration shop counter, bank branch window, post office. Staff speak fast in Punjabi and move on. Captio AI shows what they said before the exchange ends.

🍽️Group conversations

Family dinner, Vaisakhi celebration, wedding function with extended family. Multiple generations, fast Punjabi mixing with Hindi or English. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

Asking a shopkeeper for a price, getting directions in the mohalla, chatting with a neighbour. People who speak at full conversational pace. Captio AI captions anyone near you.

Informal work moments

Chai break in the office, a quick question across the floor, chat in the canteen. The moments Punjabi workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Government office window, hospital OPD counter, tehsil office, bank branch. Fast Punjabi, sometimes formal vocabulary, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

Bus conductor calling routes, asking at a railway station, auto-rickshaw conversation. Situations where you need to understand fast. Captio AI covers you anywhere.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Punjabi
90%

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.

Punjabi

Why Punjabi is hard to understand

India vs Pakistan divide

  • Indian Punjabi (Gurmukhi) and Pakistani Punjabi (Shahmukhi) are the same spoken language but different written worlds
  • Punjabi is spoken on both sides of the India-Pakistan border — Gurmukhi script in Indian Punjab, Shahmukhi/Nastaliq in Pakistani Punjab. The spoken language is largely mutually intelligible, but literacy, education, and the support systems around deafness are entirely different. A deaf person navigating Punjabi-speaking life faces a different landscape depending entirely on which side of the border they are on.

Hereditary deafness

  • Pakistani Punjab has among the highest rates of hereditary hearing loss in the world
  • A ScienceDirect study on causes of deafness in Punjab, Pakistan found consanguinity (related parents) as high as 80% among deaf people in the region — a leading driver of hereditary hearing loss. This means the deaf community in Pakistani Punjab is large relative to the general population, concentrated in families, and embedded in communities with limited formal support.

Punjabi-Hindi-Urdu mixing

  • Daily Punjabi conversations switch between Punjabi, Hindi or Urdu, and English
  • In Indian Punjab, daily speech mixes Punjabi with Hindi. In Pakistani Punjab, it mixes with Urdu. Across both sides, English words are inserted in educated urban settings. For a deaf person, this means the language of any given conversation shifts constantly without warning.

Fast colloquial registers

  • Street Punjabi is nothing like the formal or literary language
  • Formal Punjabi and everyday Punjabi are very different registers. The fast, expressive, colloquial Punjabi of a market in Amritsar or a street in Lahore — full of slang, idioms, and dropped syllables — bears little resemblance to the deliberate speech of formal settings. Daily life happens entirely in the colloquial register.

No daily support

  • Neither Indian nor Pakistani Punjab has accessibility for everyday Punjabi-speaking life
  • Indian Sign Language is used in India; Pakistani Sign Language in Pakistan. Neither has interpreter provision for daily informal settings. The bazaar, the family kitchen, the transport interactions that make up most of daily life have no visual language support on either side of the border.

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The Challenge

Millions on both sides of a border. No shared infrastructure, no shared sign language.

Punjabi is spoken by approximately 130 million people across India and Pakistan combined — one of the largest language communities in the world. India has around 63 million deaf and hard of hearing people nationally; Pakistan has approximately 10 million. Punjab province in Pakistan has a disproportionately high deaf population driven by high rates of consanguineous marriage — a ScienceDirect study found consanguinity in over 80% of deaf families in Punjab, making hereditary hearing loss endemic in many Punjabi communities. For deaf people on both sides, exclusion from daily life is total in informal settings: the market, the family table, the gurdwara courtyard, the street.

Indian Sign Language and Pakistani Sign Language are different systems with no shared infrastructure. On neither side do interpreters appear in everyday settings. The NPPCD (National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness) in India and Pakistan's disability welfare programmes have focused on institutional settings — neither has meaningful reach into the informal daily-life settings where Punjabi speakers actually live. Less than 5% of deaf children in India attend school; in Pakistan, the figure is similar.

The deaf and hard of hearing population across Punjab is growing, compounded in Pakistan by high rates of hereditary deafness and limited access to preventative healthcare. The everyday-life infrastructure to support them remains absent. Captio AI captions Punjabi speech in real time — including fast colloquial Punjabi, Punjabi-Hindi, and Punjabi-Urdu code-switching — so the market, the family gathering, and the transport interaction are no longer settings 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

"Punjabi at the market and the gurdwara is fast and expressive and nothing like formal speech. Captio AI follows it. Running errands in Amritsar is something I do alone now."

Harpreet K. 🇮🇳
harpreet.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, Amritsar

"Toronto's Punjabi community mixes Punjabi, Hindi, and English constantly. Captio AI handles all three. Family weddings and gatherings are mine now."

Gurpreet S. 🇨🇦
gurpreet.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Toronto

"Lahore Punjabi mixed with Urdu is the real daily language. Captio AI follows it. The bazaar and family kitchen are completely accessible now."

Imran A. 🇵🇰
imran.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lahore

"UK Punjabi mixes with English in ways that vary by generation. Captio AI follows all of it. Family gatherings in Birmingham are genuinely different now."

Simran D. 🇬🇧
simran.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Birmingham

"Punjabi at the market and the gurdwara is fast and expressive and nothing like formal speech. Captio AI follows it. Running errands in Amritsar is something I do alone now."

Harpreet K. 🇮🇳
harpreet.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, Amritsar

"Toronto's Punjabi community mixes Punjabi, Hindi, and English constantly. Captio AI handles all three. Family weddings and gatherings are mine now."

Gurpreet S. 🇨🇦
gurpreet.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Toronto

"Lahore Punjabi mixed with Urdu is the real daily language. Captio AI follows it. The bazaar and family kitchen are completely accessible now."

Imran A. 🇵🇰
imran.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lahore

"UK Punjabi mixes with English in ways that vary by generation. Captio AI follows all of it. Family gatherings in Birmingham are genuinely different now."

Simran D. 🇬🇧
simran.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Birmingham

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Punjabi.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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