Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Finnish 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🍽️Family dinners

A Finnish family celebration — a midsummer party (juhannus) by a lake, or a Christmas Eve dinner (joulupoyta) — brings the whole family together with overlapping conversations across a long table.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

An evening gathering with Finnish friends, often centred around a sauna followed by dinner and long, relaxed conversation that continues deep into the night.

Friend catch-ups

Meeting old friends over kahvi and pulla (cardamom bun) — the classic Finnish social ritual of a long, unhurried catch-up that can run for hours without anyone wanting to leave.

🌍Multilingual groups

A neighbourhood meeting or talkoo (community work party) where everyone talks at once about shared plans, with the informal Finnish conversational style making turn-taking hard to track.

👥Community and club meetings

A Sunday dinner with grandparents, parents, and children — where older family members may speak heavy dialect and younger ones speak city Finnish, creating a phonological gap at the same table.

🏠Shared living situations

A summer terrace or lakeside gathering with neighbours and friends — one of the most common Finnish group settings, where relaxed conversation flows over food and drink through long light evenings.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Finnish
89.4%

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.

Finnish

Why Finnish is hard to understand

Phonemic Length

  • Short and long vowels look identical on lips
  • Finnish distinguishes word meaning through vowel and consonant length: tuli (fire) vs. tulli (customs), pata (pot) vs. paata (genitive of head). These duration distinctions are critical to meaning but produce almost no visible lip change — completely inaccessible to a lip-reader.

Dialect Vowel Elision

  • Savonian Finnish removes vowels entirely
  • In Savonian and Eastern Finnish dialects, vowels are frequently dropped or contracted in casual speech: standard minakini becomes miakini or maki. At a gathering where older family members speak heavy Savonian dialect, a deaf person calibrated to standard Finnish faces a completely different set of lip patterns.

Geminates and Consonant Gradation

  • Double consonants invisible on lips
  • Finnish geminate consonants carry meaning (kissa / cat vs. kisa / competition) but the doubling produces no visible change in lip position. Consonant gradation (k/zero, p/v, t/d alternations) further unpredictably alters words across inflectional forms.

Agglutinative Suffix Chains

  • Long word endings blur together
  • Finnish word forms are built from long chains of suffixes carrying tense, case, possessive, and negation. In rapid group speech, these suffixes blend at the ends of words in a continuous visual stream that is undifferentiated on the lips.

Register and Dialect Gap

  • Helsinki slang vs. rural dialect at the same table
  • Helsinki slang (stadin slangi) uses different vocabulary and phonological features drawn from Swedish, Russian, and English borrowings. At a gathering mixing city and rural family members, the register shift is significant and unpredictable for anyone trying to lip-read consistently.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Finland: the scale of daily exclusion

Finland has a population of approximately 5.5 million, and surveys indicate that roughly 15 percent of Finnish adults experience some form of hearing loss — placing approximately 750,000 people in the category of deaf or hard of hearing. Among those over 65, the rate rises sharply, meaning that Finnish grandparents and older family members — the generation typically at the centre of family gatherings — are disproportionately affected. Despite Finland's reputation for strong social services, the intersection of hearing loss and group social participation remains a significant gap in public accessibility provision.

Research published in Audiology Research in 2025 highlights that hearing loss is frequently treated as an invisible disability, and that prejudice and social isolation remain barriers even in countries with advanced healthcare systems. In Finland specifically, the stigma around hearing aids and captioning tools means that many people with hearing loss do not request or use available supports in social settings — particularly at family gatherings where they may not want to draw attention to their difficulty. The result is systematic exclusion from the conversations that matter most.

Captio AI captions Finnish conversation in real time — whether the heavy Savonian dialect of a lakeside midsummer gathering or the fast Helsinki register of a city dinner — so deaf and hard of hearing Finns can read every voice at the table, not sit quietly on the outside of the conversation.

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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

"Finnish family gatherings — especially the long summer ones by the lake — are the hardest for me. Multiple voices, fast speech, dialect. Captio AI gives me every sentence in text."

Aino H. 🇫🇮
aino.h***@gmail.com
Tampere, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"My family speaks heavy Savonian dialect. Standard Finnish is already hard to lip-read. Savonian with its dropped vowels and different rhythm is near impossible. Captio AI handles it."

Mikko L. 🇫🇮
mikko.l***@gmail.com
Kuopio, hard of hearing since adolescence

"Kahvi ja pulla visits with friends used to mean I smiled and nodded for two hours. Now I actually know what we are talking about. Captio AI changed every social interaction I have in Finnish."

Sinikka R. 🇫🇮
sinikka.r***@gmail.com
Helsinki, deaf since birth

"Northern Finnish has its own rhythm and vowel patterns. Captio AI did not stumble on it at my family's midsummer celebration — it just kept printing words and I kept reading them."

Petri M. 🇫🇮
petri.m***@gmail.com
Oulu, progressive hearing loss

"Finnish family gatherings — especially the long summer ones by the lake — are the hardest for me. Multiple voices, fast speech, dialect. Captio AI gives me every sentence in text."

Aino H. 🇫🇮
aino.h***@gmail.com
Tampere, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"My family speaks heavy Savonian dialect. Standard Finnish is already hard to lip-read. Savonian with its dropped vowels and different rhythm is near impossible. Captio AI handles it."

Mikko L. 🇫🇮
mikko.l***@gmail.com
Kuopio, hard of hearing since adolescence

"Kahvi ja pulla visits with friends used to mean I smiled and nodded for two hours. Now I actually know what we are talking about. Captio AI changed every social interaction I have in Finnish."

Sinikka R. 🇫🇮
sinikka.r***@gmail.com
Helsinki, deaf since birth

"Northern Finnish has its own rhythm and vowel patterns. Captio AI did not stumble on it at my family's midsummer celebration — it just kept printing words and I kept reading them."

Petri M. 🇫🇮
petri.m***@gmail.com
Oulu, progressive hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Finnish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store