Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Russian live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🏪Counter conversations

Аптека counter, Почта России window, supermarket checkout, bank teller. Staff speak fast and move to the next customer without waiting. Captio AI shows what they said before the exchange ends.

🍽️Group conversations

Family gathering around the kitchen table, birthday dinner, New Year celebration. Multiple generations, overlapping voices, fast casual Russian. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

Asking for directions on the street, chatting with a neighbour in the hallway, getting help at a kiosk. People who speak at full colloquial pace. Captio AI captions anyone near you.

Informal work moments

Tea break chat in the office, a quick question called across the floor, brief exchange before a meeting. The casual moments Russian workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Clinic reception, МФЦ service window, bank branch, passport office. Fast official Russian, bureaucratic vocabulary, no repeat offered. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

Metro announcements in Moscow or St Petersburg, marshrutka driver, asking at a railway station. Situations where you need to understand the first time. Captio AI covers you anywhere.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Russian
93.8%

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.

Russian

Why Russian is hard to understand

Vowel reduction

  • Unstressed vowels disappear in everyday Russian speech
  • Formal Russian has clear, distinct vowels. Casual spoken Russian reduces every unstressed vowel dramatically — 'молоко' (milk) becomes 'malako', 'хорошо' (good) becomes 'harashó'. These reductions are not accents — they are standard spoken Russian. The written form and the spoken form are visually and acoustically different languages.

Consonant clusters

  • Russian has some of the longest consonant clusters in any European language
  • Russian words can begin and end with long strings of consonants. At natural conversation speed, the articulation of these clusters involves minimal visible mouth movement. Lip reading Russian produces almost no usable information at conversational pace.

Informal registers

  • Street Russian, mat, and youth slang are completely different from formal speech
  • Russian street speech uses mat (expletive-based intensifiers), youth slang, and informal constructions that differ entirely from the formal Russian heard on state media. Family conversations, market exchanges, and neighbour interactions operate in this register constantly. It is not a marginal variety — it is how Russian is spoken in daily life.

Formal public, informal private

  • Russian institutions speak formally. Daily life never does.
  • A government office or hospital in Russia uses formal Russian. The marshrutka driver, the produkty shop cashier, the dacha neighbour — they speak fast, colloquial, regional Russian with no accommodation. The settings that make up most of daily Russian life are entirely in the informal register.

Palatalization

  • Every Russian consonant has a hard and soft version — invisible on the lips
  • Russian has phonemic palatalization: almost every consonant exists in both a hard and a soft (palatalized) form, and the difference changes the word's meaning completely. 'Брат' (brother) vs 'брать' (to take). 'Мол' (pier) vs 'моль' (moth). The palatalization is produced at the back of the tongue with no visible difference in lip shape — and casual Russian conversation at the kitchen table or the produkty queue is dense with these contrasts.

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The Challenge

10.5 million people. Navigating daily Russian life with no interpreter in sight.

Russia has approximately 10.5 million people affected by hearing loss, and the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 estimates 9 million Russians aged 15 and older have disabling hearing loss requiring intervention. A national survey (RLMS-HSE, covering 1994–2021) found that 22.2% of Russian adults self-reported trouble hearing. For deaf Russians, exclusion from ordinary daily life looks like: the marshrutka that calls out stops by voice only, the produkty queue where the cashier does not repeat, the dacha gathering where conversation happens entirely in fast, informal Russian with no accommodation.

Russian Sign Language exists but is not legally recognised as an official language with full legal standing. RSL interpreters are concentrated in formal institutional settings — hospitals, courts, and schools. For everyday settings — the market, the neighbour's door, the public transport exchange — there is no interpreter, no captioning standard, and no legal obligation to provide accessibility. A 2013 Human Rights Watch report, 'Barriers Everywhere', documented the pervasive and consistent failure of Russian institutions to provide accessibility for people with disabilities, including deaf people, across all areas of public life.

Hearing loss prevalence in Russia is rising year-on-year, driven by an ageing population and high rates of noise exposure in industrial and urban environments. The infrastructure to support deaf people in ordinary Russian daily life is not keeping pace with the scale of the challenge. Captio AI captions Russian speech in real time — including the vowel-reduced, fast informal registers of everyday conversation — so the marshrutka ride, the produkty queue, and the family dacha gathering 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

"Moscow marshrutka drivers don't repeat. They say the stop once, fast, and the minibus moves on. Captio AI changed that. I haven't missed a stop in months."

Olga P. 🇷🇺
olga.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Moscow

"Russian vowel reduction makes lip reading almost useless. Even hearing Russians mishear each other in noisy settings. Captio AI follows the fast informal speech that makes up actual daily life."

Dmitri V. 🇷🇺
dmitri.v***@gmail.com
Deaf, Saint Petersburg

"Dacha weekends with family used to be exhausting. Everyone talking at once in fast casual Russian. Now I have Captio AI open and I follow every conversation."

Natalia K. 🇷🇺
natalia.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Yekaterinburg

"Siberian Russian has its own pace and vocabulary. Most tools trained on Moscow speech miss half of it. Captio AI handles both without any issue."

Sergei M. 🇷🇺
sergei.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Novosibirsk

"Moscow marshrutka drivers don't repeat. They say the stop once, fast, and the minibus moves on. Captio AI changed that. I haven't missed a stop in months."

Olga P. 🇷🇺
olga.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Moscow

"Russian vowel reduction makes lip reading almost useless. Even hearing Russians mishear each other in noisy settings. Captio AI follows the fast informal speech that makes up actual daily life."

Dmitri V. 🇷🇺
dmitri.v***@gmail.com
Deaf, Saint Petersburg

"Dacha weekends with family used to be exhausting. Everyone talking at once in fast casual Russian. Now I have Captio AI open and I follow every conversation."

Natalia K. 🇷🇺
natalia.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Yekaterinburg

"Siberian Russian has its own pace and vocabulary. Most tools trained on Moscow speech miss half of it. Captio AI handles both without any issue."

Sergei M. 🇷🇺
sergei.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Novosibirsk

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Russian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store