Estonian live captions and productivity tool for group settings
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Estonian group settings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Estonian 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.
Estonian family celebrations — Jaanipäev bonfires, Christmas Eve, name-day dinners — bring multiple generations together. Captio AI keeps the full conversation accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing family members across the table.
House parties and neighbourhood gatherings in Tallinn, Tartu, or a smaller Estonian town involve overlapping voices and quick topic shifts. Captio AI follows each speaker in real time so deaf guests can participate rather than watch.
A coffee or tea catch-up with Estonian friends at a kohvik is intimate and fast. Captio AI captions every exchange so a deaf person can contribute at the right moment rather than guessing at what was said.
Community events, küla gatherings, and local association meetings use fast conversational Estonian. Captio AI makes the full discussion followable without a professional interpreter.
When grandparents use Võro or older Estonian forms and grandchildren speak Tallinn urban Estonian, the variation is significant. Captio AI captions both and keeps the multigenerational table connected.
Gatherings at a choir rehearsal, a folk dance group, or a diaspora community event 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
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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 Estonian is hard to understand
Three-way phonemic length
- Duration differences invisible on the lips
- Estonian has a unique three-way contrast in vowel and consonant length: short (Q1), long (Q2), and overlong (Q3). These distinctions are carried entirely in duration — 'koli' (junk), 'kolli' (monster), and an overlong form are different words that look identical on the lips. No other language in Europe uses this three-way contrast, and it cannot be recovered by sight.
Nine-vowel system
- Front rounded vowels reduce at speed
- Estonian has nine vowel phonemes including /ü/, /ö/, and the central /õ/ — sounds with no equivalent in most European languages. These vowels have distinct lip configurations in careful speech, but in fast conversational Estonian they reduce toward a narrower set, making the contrast that was barely visible disappear entirely.
Võro and Seto gap
- South Estonian varieties read like a different language
- The Võro and Seto varieties of South Estonian are distinct enough that many speakers consider them separate languages. At a multigenerational gathering in southeastern Estonia, grandparents may use Võro while younger family members use standard Estonian — two phonological systems arriving without any transition signal.
Agglutinative suffix chains
- Long word-endings blur at conversational speed
- Estonian is highly agglutinative — a single word may carry several grammatical suffixes that form a rapid sequence of small mouth movements. At conversational speed, these suffix chains blur into each other with few separable word-boundary cues, giving a deaf lip-reader little to anchor on at the end of long words.
Estonian-Russian code-switching
- A second phonological system enters mid-sentence
- A significant Russian-speaking minority in Estonia means community gatherings often involve Estonian-Russian code-switching. The two languages have very different phonology — Russian has soft consonant pairs, different vowel qualities, and different stress patterns. A deaf lip-reader tracking Estonian suddenly faces a completely different visual system without warning.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Estonia: the scale of daily exclusion
Estonia is home to an estimated 43,500 deaf and hard-of-hearing people — approximately 3.3% of the general population — according to estimates from Estonia's deaf associations. This places Estonia's hearing loss prevalence rate above the European average, suggesting persistent gaps in early identification, newborn screening, and hearing aid provision relative to larger Western European countries. Of these 43,500 people, a smaller subset use Estonian Sign Language (Eesti Viipekeel, EVK) as their primary means of communication, while the majority navigate daily life through residual hearing, lip-reading, or improvised workarounds.
Estonian Sign Language dates to 1866, when the first deaf school was established in Vändra, but modern interpreter provision has struggled to keep pace with need. A systematic review on hearing loss and social isolation (PMC8292986) identified strong associations between untreated hearing loss and exclusion from community life — particularly from the informal social settings that make up most of daily experience: family dinners, neighbourhood gatherings, and spontaneous group conversations that have no structured captioning provision.
Captio AI captions Estonian conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a family dinner in Tallinn or a community gathering in Tartu without relying on a scarce interpreter or asking others to slow down.
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
"Jaanipäev with the whole family is the one night where everyone talks at once around the bonfire. I used to miss almost everything. Captio AI changed that completely."
"My grandparents speak Võro and I have always struggled to follow them. Captio AI handles both Võro and standard Estonian. Family visits in Põlvamaa feel completely different now."
"At Estonian community events in Helsinki the conversation moves between Estonian and Finnish constantly. Captio AI follows both and I have not felt isolated at a community gathering in over a year."
"The three-way vowel length in Estonian — I never realised how much I had been missing. Captio AI shows me the words I was guessing at. I have started contributing to conversations I used to avoid."
"Jaanipäev with the whole family is the one night where everyone talks at once around the bonfire. I used to miss almost everything. Captio AI changed that completely."
"My grandparents speak Võro and I have always struggled to follow them. Captio AI handles both Võro and standard Estonian. Family visits in Põlvamaa feel completely different now."
"At Estonian community events in Helsinki the conversation moves between Estonian and Finnish constantly. Captio AI follows both and I have not felt isolated at a community gathering in over a year."
"The three-way vowel length in Estonian — I never realised how much I had been missing. Captio AI shows me the words I was guessing at. I have started contributing to conversations I used to avoid."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Keep up with the group in Estonian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store