Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Swedish 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

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🏪Counter conversations

Apotek counter, Posten window, supermarket checkout, kommunkontor desk. Staff speak fast in Swedish and move on. Captio AI shows what they said before the moment passes.

🍽️Group conversations

Sunday family middag, birthday celebration, fika with neighbours. Multiple generations, fast overlapping Swedish, regional accents varying by landskap. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

Asking for directions in the city, chatting with a neighbour in the trapphuset, meeting someone at the loppis or market. People who speak at full conversational pace. Captio AI captions anyone near you.

Informal work moments

Fikapaus conversation, a quick question in the korridoren, catch-up before a meeting. The moments Swedish workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Vårdcentral reception, Skatteverket counter, bank branch, Försäkringskassan office. Formal vocabulary, fast delivery, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

Tunnelbana and bus announcements, asking at a centralstation, taxi conversation. Situations where you need to understand the first time. Captio AI covers you anywhere.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Swedish
91.8%

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.

Swedish

Why Swedish is hard to understand

Pitch accent

  • Swedish uses two distinct musical tones to distinguish word meanings — both entirely acoustic
  • Swedish has a tonal pitch accent system with two distinct prosodic patterns — accent 1 and accent 2 — that differentiate otherwise identical words. The classic example: 'anden' with accent 1 means the spirit; with accent 2, the duck. These tonal distinctions are carried entirely in the voice and produce no visible lip difference. A lip-reader misses them completely every time, producing systematic misunderstanding of common Swedish vocabulary.

Minimal lip movement

  • Swedish speakers are culturally known for speaking with tight, minimal jaw and lip movement
  • Swedish conversational norms produce notoriously small mouth movements. This is sometimes called 'Swedish mumbling' — not pathological, simply a cultural speech habit of speaking quietly and with tight lip and jaw position. For a deaf person attempting lip-reading, this cultural norm reduces the already-limited information available from visual lip observation to near-zero.

Fika exclusion

  • Swedish fika culture is built on fast group conversation — the social ritual that deaf Swedes are systematically excluded from
  • Fika — the Swedish coffee and cake break — is not simply a refreshment pause. It is the central bonding ritual of Swedish workplace and social culture. Relationships are built at fika. Deaf or hard of hearing Swedes who cannot follow fika conversation are excluded from the primary social infrastructure of Swedish professional and community life.

Interpretation restrictions

  • Swedish sign language interpretation services are hedged with conditions and formalities
  • A 2021 Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research study found that access to Swedish Sign Language (STS) interpretation was 'enveloped in diffuse restrictions, reservations, and formulations.' Deaf Swedes must argue formally for the right to a conversation rather than simply having one. This is most acute in everyday informal settings — fika, dinner, neighbourhood — that fall outside formal entitlements entirely.

Multilingual mixing

  • Sweden's diverse immigrant communities create unpredictable code-switching in everyday Swedish
  • Sweden's large immigrant communities from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Poland, and other countries speak Swedish inflected with diverse phoneme patterns. In mixed urban neighbourhoods, everyday Swedish conversation contains accents and mixing patterns that differ significantly from the standard Swedish a deaf person may have practiced lip-reading. The phonemic landscape of everyday Swedish in Stockholm or Malmö is genuinely heterogeneous.

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The Challenge

1.3 million Swedes with hearing loss. Interpretation access hedged with restrictions. No captions at fika, the market, or the middag table.

Around 1.3 million people in Sweden — roughly 13% of the population of 10 million — live with some degree of hearing loss. Swedish deaf and hard of hearing people navigate a social culture built on acoustic ritual: the fika, the middag, the grannsamverkan conversation. Without hearing, these settings — which Swedish culture treats as foundational to belonging and professional success — are environments of exclusion rather than inclusion. The fika is not a break; it is where Swedish professional relationships are formed. Missing it is not an inconvenience; it is structural exclusion from how Swedish workplaces function.

Sweden has one of Europe's most developed disability rights frameworks, with the Discrimination Act covering deaf individuals and state-funded Swedish Sign Language (STS) interpretation services. But a 2021 Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research paper found that those services were 'enveloped in diffuse restrictions, reservations, and formulations' — meaning deaf people must argue formally for the right to a conversation rather than simply having one. This is most acute in the everyday informal settings that fall outside formal entitlements: the fika, the dinner party, the market, the neighbourhood chat. These are precisely the settings that determine whether a deaf Swede belongs to their community or watches it from a distance.

Research on Swedish men found hearing loss prevalence rising over the decades tracked from the 1970s through the 1990s, reflecting growing noise exposure. Sweden's aging population will substantially increase the number of people with age-related hearing loss through the 2030s. The gap between those who need support in everyday conversations and those who can access it is set to widen. Captio AI captions Swedish speech in real time — including pitch accent distinctions and fast informal fika Swedish — so the coffee break, the dinner party, and the market are no longer settings you have to experience from the outside.

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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

"Fika at work was the thing I missed most. Fast Swedish around a small table. Captio AI captions it. I belong to the fika group now and it has changed everything at work."

Maja L. 🇸🇪
maja.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Stockholm

"Gothenburg Swedish sounds different from Stockholm Swedish. Captio AI handles both. The torg market and the supermarket are places I navigate entirely alone now."

Erik J. 🇸🇪
erik.j***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Gothenburg

"Malmö Swedish has heavy Arabic and Somali influence. Captio AI follows the mixed accents. Neighbourhood conversations are things I actually follow now."

Ingrid B. 🇸🇪
ingrid.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Malmö

"Swedish pitch accents are invisible when you're lip-reading. Captio AI captures them acoustically. Misunderstandings I had for years have just disappeared."

Lars A. 🇸🇪
lars.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Uppsala

"Fika at work was the thing I missed most. Fast Swedish around a small table. Captio AI captions it. I belong to the fika group now and it has changed everything at work."

Maja L. 🇸🇪
maja.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Stockholm

"Gothenburg Swedish sounds different from Stockholm Swedish. Captio AI handles both. The torg market and the supermarket are places I navigate entirely alone now."

Erik J. 🇸🇪
erik.j***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Gothenburg

"Malmö Swedish has heavy Arabic and Somali influence. Captio AI follows the mixed accents. Neighbourhood conversations are things I actually follow now."

Ingrid B. 🇸🇪
ingrid.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Malmö

"Swedish pitch accents are invisible when you're lip-reading. Captio AI captures them acoustically. Misunderstandings I had for years have just disappeared."

Lars A. 🇸🇪
lars.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Uppsala

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Swedish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store