Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Catalan live captions and productivity tool for group settings

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.

🍽️Family dinners

A Catalan family celebration — a Sunday lunch in a family home, a Sant Joan fire festival gathering, or a Christmas meal — brings multiple generations around a table where Catalan flows continuously for hours.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

An evening with friends in a Barcelona bar or at someone's home, switching freely between Catalan and Spanish mid-conversation without anyone tracking which language the next sentence starts in.

Friend catch-ups

Meeting old friends over coffee and a croissant in a Catalan cafe, catching up on family news and local politics in a long, relaxed exchange that stretches through the afternoon.

🌍Multilingual groups

A neighbourhood association (associacio de veins) meeting where residents discuss local issues and several people speak simultaneously in rapid Catalan.

👥Community and club meetings

A family meal where grandparents speak a more conservative Eastern Catalan, parents use a mixed urban register, and children code-switch freely with Spanish — all around the same table.

🏠Shared living situations

A friend group gathering at a terrace bar or on a beach — a summer social moment typical in Catalonia where Catalan and Spanish flow freely alongside each other.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Catalan
89.3%

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 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.

Catalan

Why Catalan is hard to understand

Eastern Catalan Vowel Reduction

  • Five written vowels, two visible ones
  • Eastern Catalan (spoken in Barcelona and most of Catalonia) reduces all unstressed low and mid vowels to schwa or u. Words that in writing show five different vowel shapes produce just two on a speaker's lips in natural speech — creating massive ambiguity for any lip-reader trying to identify unstressed syllables.

Balearic Stressed Schwa

  • A vowel that does not exist in other dialects
  • Balearic Catalan uses a stressed schwa that does not exist in Eastern or Western Catalan. The same word looks different on a speaker from Mallorca versus one from Barcelona — producing unexpected lip patterns at gatherings with guests from the islands.

Final-Obstruent Devoicing

  • Word endings change inside the mouth
  • Catalan devoices all obstruents at word-final position. A word ending in a voiced stop on paper is pronounced with its voiceless counterpart. The lip shape remains similar but the production inside the mouth changes — and in fast speech this devoicing extends across word boundaries.

Valencian Phonological Divergence

  • Barcelona and Valencia sound different on the lips
  • Valencian does not reduce unstressed vowels the same way Eastern Catalan does, has different prosody, and is standardised on a different base. At a gathering mixing speakers from Barcelona and Valencia, the same sentence produces markedly different lip patterns on each speaker's face.

Catalan-Spanish Code-Switching

  • Language changes mid-sentence without signal
  • In Catalonia, virtually all Catalan speakers also speak Spanish and switch between them mid-sentence in casual speech. A deaf person following Catalan lip patterns is constantly confronted with Spanish phonology — and vice versa — without any transition signal.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Catalonia: the scale of daily exclusion

In Spain, approximately 1,064,000 people are deaf or have a hearing disability (2.3 percent of the population), according to the National Statistics Institute disability survey, with a broader estimate placing total hearing loss prevalence at around 10 percent — approximately 5 million Spaniards — when mild and moderate losses are included. Catalan is spoken by an estimated 10 million people across Catalonia, the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands, and parts of Aragon and France, meaning hundreds of thousands of Catalan speakers navigate daily social life with limited hearing access.

Research on the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on people with hearing disabilities in Spain found that isolation from group social settings — exactly the contexts where Catalan social life is richest — disproportionately affected deaf and hard of hearing people. Spain recognised Spanish Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language in the 2007 Sign Languages Law, a progressive step. But the practical infrastructure for real-time communication access at social events, community meetings, and family gatherings has not kept pace with legal recognition, and captioning provision in Catalan specifically remains limited.

Captio AI captions Catalan conversation in real time — whether the vowel-reduced Eastern Catalan of a Barcelona dinner or the open-vowelled Valencian of a family meal in Valencia — so deaf and hard of hearing people can follow every voice at the table, in whichever variety the speaker uses.

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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

"Catalan family dinners in Barcelona mix Eastern Catalan with Spanish and the speech is fast. Captio AI gave me my family's conversation back — every sentence, in Catalan, in real time."

Mireia P. 🇪🇸
mireia.p***@gmail.com
Barcelona, severe bilateral hearing loss

"Half my family speaks Valencian and half speaks Central Catalan — totally different vowel reductions. Captio AI handled both without me having to switch any settings."

Jordi M. 🇪🇸
jordi.m***@gmail.com
Girona, hard of hearing since adolescence

"Mallorqui sounds very different from Barcelona Catalan. Captio AI transcribed my family's dialect accurately enough that I could follow Sunday lunch for the first time in years."

Nuria R. 🇪🇸
nuria.r***@gmail.com
Palma de Mallorca, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"In French Catalonia we speak an older form of Catalan mixed with French. Captio AI handles the Catalan parts well — which gives me access to my grandparents' stories for the first time."

Carles V. 🇫🇷
carles.v***@gmail.com
Perpignan, Northern Catalonia France, deaf since birth

"Catalan family dinners in Barcelona mix Eastern Catalan with Spanish and the speech is fast. Captio AI gave me my family's conversation back — every sentence, in Catalan, in real time."

Mireia P. 🇪🇸
mireia.p***@gmail.com
Barcelona, severe bilateral hearing loss

"Half my family speaks Valencian and half speaks Central Catalan — totally different vowel reductions. Captio AI handled both without me having to switch any settings."

Jordi M. 🇪🇸
jordi.m***@gmail.com
Girona, hard of hearing since adolescence

"Mallorqui sounds very different from Barcelona Catalan. Captio AI transcribed my family's dialect accurately enough that I could follow Sunday lunch for the first time in years."

Nuria R. 🇪🇸
nuria.r***@gmail.com
Palma de Mallorca, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"In French Catalonia we speak an older form of Catalan mixed with French. Captio AI handles the Catalan parts well — which gives me access to my grandparents' stories for the first time."

Carles V. 🇫🇷
carles.v***@gmail.com
Perpignan, Northern Catalonia France, deaf since birth

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Catalan.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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