Vietnamese live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

Vietnam has approximately 1.3 million people with significant hearing impairment, with broader estimates including mild and moderate loss reaching 2.5 million, according to national surveys and international programme data. Each year, between 1,200 and 1,400 children are born with severe congenital hearing loss, according to the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training. For deaf people navigating Vietnamese daily life, exclusion is structurally unavoidable: Vietnamese is a tonal language with six tones in the Northern variety, and all tonal meaning is carried by pitch — a channel that is entirely closed to deaf and hard of hearing listeners, leaving lip reading to provide only a consonant-vowel skeleton with no semantic content.

Vietnamese Sign Language (VSL) services are primarily concentrated in urban centres and specialist institutions supported by international organisations — the World Bank and Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss have documented the significant gap between need and provision. For everyday informal settings — the street food stall, the wet market, the family kitchen, the xe ôm — there is no interpreter, no captioning infrastructure, and no accessibility provision of any kind. Vietnam has no nationwide universal newborn hearing screening programme, meaning many children reach school age without a diagnosis.

Vietnam's urbanising, ageing population and high rates of noise exposure in manufacturing and construction are increasing hearing loss prevalence. The gap between the scale of the deaf and hard of hearing population and the daily-life infrastructure to support them is one of the largest in Southeast Asia. Captio AI captions Vietnamese speech in real time — including tonal accuracy across both Hanoi and Saigon varieties — so the street stall, the wet market, and the family gathering are no longer settings you have to navigate alone.