French live captions and productivity tool for group settings
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow French group settings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing French 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.
A Sunday family lunch (déjeuner dominical) in Lyon, Bordeaux, or Paris where fast French, overlapping conversation, and multiple generations make lip-reading the full meal very demanding. Captio AI on the table captions each voice so you follow from entrée to dessert.
An apéro (pre-dinner drinks gathering) with friends where the conversation moves quickly between subjects and voices. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking near your phone so you stay in every exchange.
A family gathering during summer holidays where relatives from Paris, Marseille, and Brittany speak their regional variety at the same table. Captio AI handles each regional accent.
A neighbourhood gathering or community association event in French where multiple contributors speak quickly with no formal captioning. Captio AI gives you a real-time transcript of every speaker.
A multigenerational family celebration where grandparents speak a regional variety with distinct phonology and grandchildren speak fast contemporary French with slang and Verlan. Captio AI follows both.
A social gathering at a café with friends where fast colloquial French, Verlan, and Arabic words mix in the same conversation. Captio AI captions the full exchange.
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 French is hard to understand
Liaison and enchaînement
- French connects words into a continuous stream with no audible gaps at word boundaries
- French has obligatory liaison (linking consonants between words: 'les amis' → 'lezamis') and enchaînement (consonant linking across syllable boundaries). In fast casual speech, French sounds like an unbroken stream with no gaps between words — the boundaries that a deaf person uses to parse individual words dissolve. For a lip-reader, word boundaries provide structure for comprehension; in French conversation, those boundaries disappear into flowing connected speech.
Colloquial register drop
- Casual French drops the grammatical elements that formal French makes explicit
- French colloquial speech drops 'ne' in negation ('je sais pas' not 'je ne sais pas'), often drops subject pronouns ('sais pas'), and uses contracted forms throughout: 'y'a', 'c'est', 'j'vais'. The formal French of school, broadcast, and textbooks is not the French spoken at a family Sunday lunch or an apéro with friends. A deaf person calibrated to formal register encounters a substantially different phonological and syntactic environment in every social setting.
Québécois vs European French
- Quebec French and Metropolitan French are phonologically distinct enough to confuse even hearing speakers
- Québécois French has vowel shifts — notably affrication of /t/ and /d/ before /i/ and /y/ (so 'tu' sounds like 'tsu') — distinct vocabulary, and different prosodic rhythm. African French (Senegalese, Congolese, Ivorian) has different consonant patterns and intonation. At diaspora gatherings or in multi-Francophone communities, a deaf person calibrated to Parisian French encounters phonologically different language from Canadian or African speakers — a change in the phonological ground that carries no signal.
Verlan and urban slang
- French urban social speech uses Verlan and Arabic-French mixing that standard French training does not cover
- Verlan (back-slang with syllable inversion) and Arabic-French borrowings are common in social gatherings among younger and diverse urban French communities: 'c'est trop ouf' (= trop fou, too crazy), 'wallah', 'c'est chelou' (= louche, sketchy). This vocabulary is not in any standard French resource and creates a comprehension gap for a deaf person who has trained on formal or standard colloquial French. In diverse urban communities — Île-de-France, Marseille, Lyon — Verlan appears at most social gatherings.
Fast social pace
- French conversation at dinners and social gatherings moves at high speed with overlapping contributions
- French social conversation — the family Sunday lunch, the apéro, the gathering of friends — is characteristically fast, with overlapping contributions, interruptions, and rapid topic changes. This is a cultural norm, not an anomaly. For a deaf person lip-reading French, the fast pace of natural conversation at a social gathering leaves minimal visual processing time, and the liaison that merges words makes the already rapid stream harder to segment.
Download for free
Download on theApp Store10 million hearing-impaired in France. 25% of adults affected. Only 37% of those with severe loss use a hearing aid.
France has approximately 10 million hearing-impaired people — 16.1% of the population — of whom around 360,000 have 'very serious or total' functional limitations, identifying as deaf or hard of hearing. A study by INSERM (France's national health research institute) found that 25% of French adults are affected by some form of hearing loss. Despite this scale, only 37% of people with severe hearing loss wear a hearing aid in France — a treatment gap driven by cost, availability, and the social stigma of visible hearing devices.
French Sign Language (LSF) was officially recognised in 2005 — relatively late compared to other Western European countries. Despite recognition, interpreter provision in informal social settings does not exist. The French family Sunday lunch, the apéro with friends, the community association meeting — these are settings where no formal communication support is available and where the cultural expectation is active participation in a fast-moving conversation. A deaf or hard of hearing French person who cannot keep up with the liaison-fused speed of French social speech has no formal recourse in any of these settings.
Captio AI captions French in real time — across Parisian, Lyonnais, Marseillais, and other regional varieties, as well as Québécois and African French — so the Sunday lunch, the family celebration, and the apéro with friends are settings a deaf person can follow without tracking liaison through a rapidly spoken stream of connected syllables.
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
"French family Sundays are long and fast and everyone talks over each other. Liaison makes it all one continuous sound. Captio AI on the table means I follow the whole lunch for the first time."
"Marseillais French is already fast and the accent is specific. Add Verlan and Arabic words and I was following maybe a quarter of any gathering. Captio AI captions the real thing."
"Québécois French at a family gathering is a different phonological universe from what I see in European lip-reading resources. Captio AI handles both and I follow my family wherever we are."
"French in Dakar has a rhythm that is completely different from Paris French. Family gatherings in Senegal were hard to follow visually. Captio AI captions the actual speech."
"French family Sundays are long and fast and everyone talks over each other. Liaison makes it all one continuous sound. Captio AI on the table means I follow the whole lunch for the first time."
"Marseillais French is already fast and the accent is specific. Add Verlan and Arabic words and I was following maybe a quarter of any gathering. Captio AI captions the real thing."
"Québécois French at a family gathering is a different phonological universe from what I see in European lip-reading resources. Captio AI handles both and I follow my family wherever we are."
"French in Dakar has a rhythm that is completely different from Paris French. Family gatherings in Senegal were hard to follow visually. Captio AI captions the actual speech."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Keep up with the group in French.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store