Basque live captions and productivity tool for group settings
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Basque group settings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Basque speakers.
Follow whoever is speaking
- Captions the active voice at any moment
- Works at dinner tables, parties, and social gatherings
- Place the phone in the centre of the group
- Any accent, any pace
For multilingual groups
- Each person speaks their own language
- You read in yours, in real time
- 60+ languages, no switching
- For international families, mixed-language groups, travel
Transcribe any group conversation
- Record and get the full conversation in writing
- Organised by speaker
- Review who said what after the fact
- Any group size, any language
Key points from any group discussion
- Decisions and takeaways extracted automatically
- Useful for group meetings and community discussions
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Basque family gatherings — Sunday lunches with the whole etxea, Christmas dinners, and birthday celebrations — are long, loud, and central to Basque social life. Captio AI keeps the full conversation accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing family members.
House gatherings and neighbourhood get-togethers in Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastián, or a smaller Basque town move between Euskara and Spanish fluidly. Captio AI follows both languages in real time so deaf guests can stay part of every exchange.
A catch-up with friends over pintxos and cider in a Basque bar is fast, noisy, and easy to miss. Captio AI captions every word so a deaf person can contribute at the right moment rather than guessing from fragments.
Neighbourhood association meetings, community events, and ikastola parent gatherings use fast conversational Basque. Captio AI makes the full discussion followable without a professional interpreter.
When grandparents speak an older Basque variety and grandchildren mix in Spanish, the phonological range widens. Captio AI captions both and keeps the multigenerational table connected.
Cider house gatherings, txoko dinner society evenings, and sports club reunions involve rapid exchanges between familiar members. Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard-of-hearing member part of every conversation.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Built to keep you in the conversation, not just in the room
Captions whoever is speaking
Captio AI follows the dominant voice at any moment — whoever is loudest in the microphone's direction. In a group conversation, this tracks the active speaker naturally.
Works through background noise
Restaurants, living rooms, parties, outdoor gatherings. Moderate background noise does not prevent accurate captions — Captio AI is built for real environments, not quiet rooms.
Place it in the centre and forget it
Put the phone on the table or in the middle of the group, microphone facing the conversation. No positioning it after every speaker change, no adjusting between voices.
Less effort, less fatigue
The cognitive load of following a group conversation by lip-reading and reconstructing speech is exhausting. Captio AI handles the following so you can direct your energy toward actually being in the conversation.
60+ languages
For multilingual families, mixed-language social groups, or gatherings where people switch between languages mid-conversation. No setup required between language changes.
No setup between conversations
Open the app and place the phone. No configuration per setting, no briefing the group, nothing to manage between conversations. It works for any group, in any situation.
Why Basque is hard to understand
Linguistic isolate
- No cross-linguistic support for lip-reading
- Basque has no known relationship to any other language family. For deaf lip-readers who draw on cross-linguistic intuitions — recognising Romance or Germanic root patterns from other languages they know — Basque offers nothing familiar. Every word must be learned entirely from scratch with no analogical support from other languages.
Dialect divergence
- Souletin and Biscayan read like different languages
- Basque has five dialect groups, and Souletin (Zuberoan), spoken in the French Basque Country, is sufficiently divergent from Biscayan or Gipuzkoan to be nearly unintelligible to other Basque speakers. At a family gathering spanning Bilbao and Mauléon, a deaf lip-reader encounters two phonological systems with different vowel qualities, different consonant inventories, and different prosodic patterns.
Agglutinative suffix chains
- Long word-endings blur at speed
- Basque is highly agglutinative — a single word can carry multiple grammatical suffixes that form a rapid sequence at the end. In fast conversational speech, these suffix chains blur into each other with few separable word-boundary cues, leaving lip-reading almost nothing to anchor on at the end of longer words.
Basque-Spanish code-switching
- Two phonologically different systems, one conversation
- Urban Basque Country — especially Bilbao and Donostia-San Sebastián — involves constant code-switching between Euskara and Spanish. The two languages have radically different phonological inventories. A deaf lip-reader must track both systems simultaneously without knowing when the switch will occur.
Sibilant and lateral contrasts
- Multiple sound pairs invisible on the face
- Basque distinguishes multiple sibilant pairs (/s/ vs /ts/ vs /tz/) and lateral pairs (/l/ vs /ll/) produced with subtle variations in tongue position. These contrasts are difficult to distinguish by sight at normal speed and disappear almost entirely in fast casual conversation.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in the Basque Country and Spain: the scale of daily exclusion
Around one in ten people in Spain live with hearing loss — approximately five million people — according to EuroTrak survey data, placing Spain fifth in Europe for hearing loss prevalence. A 2022 study (PMC9859572) examining the impact of COVID-19 on Spaniards with hearing disabilities found that pandemic masking sharply worsened communication barriers: masks removed the last visual lip-reading cue that many hearing-impaired people depended on in social interactions. In the Basque Country, with a population of approximately 2.2 million, this translates to an estimated 200,000 people living with some degree of hearing difficulty.
Spain's national deaf federation (CNSE) has documented that Spanish sign language was historically prohibited in classrooms for decades, leaving many older deaf people without a shared communication system. In the Basque Country, the Euskal Gorrak deaf association provides services, but interpreter provision outside Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastián, and Vitoria-Gasteiz is sparse. For the many Basque speakers who navigate daily social life through lip-reading rather than sign language, the combination of Basque's unique phonology and constant code-switching into Spanish creates barriers that standard accessibility tools do not address.
Captio AI captions Basque conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a family gathering in Bilbao, a txoko dinner in Donostia-San Sebastián, or a cider house evening with friends without depending on a scarce interpreter.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"Sunday lunch with the whole family — Euskara, Spanish, everyone talking at once. I used to follow maybe half of it. Captio AI gives me the full conversation and I actually feel like I am there."
"Basque is so unlike any other language that I could never use my Spanish lip-reading skills to fill the gaps. Captio AI handles the Euskara directly. Pintxos evenings with friends are completely different now."
"My family in the French Basque Country speaks Souletin, which sounds very different from the Basque my Spanish cousins use. Captio AI follows both. Family reunions finally feel manageable."
"At the txoko dinner the whole table speaks fast Basque with Spanish mixed in. I used to sit at the end and contribute almost nothing. Captio AI changed that. I can read the conversation and respond at the right moment."
"Sunday lunch with the whole family — Euskara, Spanish, everyone talking at once. I used to follow maybe half of it. Captio AI gives me the full conversation and I actually feel like I am there."
"Basque is so unlike any other language that I could never use my Spanish lip-reading skills to fill the gaps. Captio AI handles the Euskara directly. Pintxos evenings with friends are completely different now."
"My family in the French Basque Country speaks Souletin, which sounds very different from the Basque my Spanish cousins use. Captio AI follows both. Family reunions finally feel manageable."
"At the txoko dinner the whole table speaks fast Basque with Spanish mixed in. I used to sit at the end and contribute almost nothing. Captio AI changed that. I can read the conversation and respond at the right moment."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Keep up with the group in Basque.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store