Live captions and productivity tool for group settings

There is a named phenomenon in deaf and hard of hearing communities called Dinner Table Syndrome — the experience of being physically present at a family gathering while being entirely excluded from the conversation happening around you (Taylor & Francis, 2025). You sit at the same table as everyone else. You share the same meal. You are in the room. But the conversation moves too fast, the acoustics are too poor, and the people around you do not know what to do — so they keep talking to each other, and you keep watching.

Group settings are uniquely exhausting for deaf and hard of hearing people because they combine every factor that makes following speech harder: background noise, multiple voices, unpredictable speaker switching, and the absence of any formal support. Research consistently finds that the cognitive load of listening in noisy, multi-speaker environments is significantly higher for people with hearing loss — and that this load directly leads to fatigue and withdrawal from social participation (PMC, 2024).

The withdrawal is rational. If following a two-hour family dinner requires sustained concentration that leaves you exhausted, you start finding reasons not to go. If contributing to a group conversation means asking for repeats that disrupt the flow and mark you as different, you start nodding instead of engaging. The reduction in social participation is not passive — it is an active response to an environment that was not designed for you. Researchers link this pattern directly to increased social isolation and its downstream effects on mental health (PMC, 2023).

Captio AI is built for the table. Place the phone in the centre, open the app, and follow every speaker in real time — without the effort, without the fatigue, without the gap between being present and being included.