Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

German 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 Sunday Sonntagsessen or a holiday gathering where relatives from different Bundesländer each bring their own dialect and three conversations run at once. Put Captio AI on the table and follow every voice, whatever the accent.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A birthday party or a summer Grillfest in the garden, where music, laughter, and people talking at different angles make lip-reading impossible. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking near your phone so you stay in the conversation.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with friends at a Kneipe or the regular Stammtisch table, where the casual dialect-coloured German of close friends moves fast and nobody thinks to slow down. Captio AI follows every exchange.

🌍Multilingual groups

A multilingual household gathering where German mixes with Turkish, Russian, or English in the same sentence. Captio AI captions each language so code-switching does not break the thread.

👥Community and club meetings

A Verein meeting, a club evening, or a school Elternabend where multiple people contribute quickly and no captioning is provided. Captio AI captions each contributor in real time.

🏠Shared living situations

A shared-flat WG dinner or an evening with housemates — slang, nicknames, and half-finished sentences at full speed. Captio AI keeps you in every part of it.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

German
93%

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.

German

Why German is hard to understand

Dialect gulf

  • A Bavarian grandparent and a Hamburg cousin sound like different languages
  • German's regional varieties — Bavarian, Swabian, Saxon, Low German — shift vowels, consonants, and rhythm so far that a deaf person calibrated to one is lost with another. A single family gathering routinely brings several regional accents to the same table with no shared phonological ground.

Diglossia

  • The clean Hochdeutsch drops to dialect the moment it relaxes
  • Germans switch between standard Hochdeutsch and their local Mundart depending on how relaxed the setting is — and a family dinner or a Stammtisch is as relaxed as it gets. A deaf person who follows the tidy standard on television meets a much looser, dialect-coloured version among relatives and old friends.

Invisible consonants

  • Many German sounds are made where the lips cannot show them
  • German's velar and uvular consonants — the throaty /x/ in 'Bauch', the uvular /r/ — and its fortis–lenis pairs like p/b and t/d are near-invisible or identical on the lips. Around a table where people sit at different angles, the small share of speech that is visible drops further, and a deaf person is left guessing from context.

Fast group pace

  • German group talk runs on overlaps and interruptions
  • Social German moves fast, with people talking over each other and topics abandoned mid-sentence. When one relative jumps in over another, the visual thread a deaf person is tracking dissolves without warning — the norm at a birthday party or a Grillfest, not the exception.

Multilingual switching

  • German households slip into Turkish, Russian, or English mid-sentence
  • Many groups in Germany mix German with Turkish, Russian, Arabic, or English, and the switch comes without signal and often carries the key names and details. A deaf person following German loses the thread the moment a sentence crosses into the other language.

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The Challenge

11 million people. Present at the table, left out of the conversation.

An estimated 11.1 million people in Germany — around 16.2% of the adult population — live with hearing impairment meeting WHO criteria, and roughly 235,000 are deaf or severely hard of hearing. Of the 9.24 million who self-report hearing loss, fewer than half wear hearing aids, so most navigate everyday conversation with no assistive support at all. They are in every family, every Verein, and every circle of friends.

A 2023 online survey of deaf and hard of hearing adults in Germany, published in Frontiers in Communication, found they experience markedly more loneliness and social exclusion than hearing peers — and the settings where that bites hardest are not clinics or offices but the ordinary social ones where no accommodation is expected: the family meal, the party, the club evening. In rural areas the isolation deepens, with everyday gatherings offering no support and little awareness. It is the everyday experience of being physically present while socially shut out — sitting at the table without following the table.

German Sign Language was legally recognised in 2002, but no law reaches the Sunday dinner or the Grillfest, and no interpreter is booked for a friend's birthday. Captio AI captions every German voice in a group in real time — across Bavarian, Swabian, Saxon, and standard German — so the family meal, the garden barbecue, and the Stammtisch are conversations a deaf or hard of hearing person can follow without the exhaustion of constant lip-reading.

Download for free

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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

"Sunday dinners are fast Bavarian and everyone talks over everyone. I used to sit there nodding. Captio AI on the table means I follow the whole meal now."

Andreas Schmitt 🇩🇪
andreas.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Munich, Germany

"My relatives speak Saxon at speed and it looks nothing like the Hochdeutsch I read on TV. I put Captio AI in the middle of the table and it changed what family gatherings feel like."

Petra Wagner 🇩🇪
petra.w***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Dresden, Germany

"At home we switch between German and Turkish in the same sentence. Captio AI follows both so I'm not watching faces and guessing which language just appeared."

Mehmet Yıldız 🇩🇪
mehmet.y***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Berlin, Germany

"Our Verein evenings are a room full of Swabian and side conversations. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking near me so I can actually take part instead of burning out."

Sabine Fischer 🇩🇪
sabine.f***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Stuttgart, Germany

"Sunday dinners are fast Bavarian and everyone talks over everyone. I used to sit there nodding. Captio AI on the table means I follow the whole meal now."

Andreas Schmitt 🇩🇪
andreas.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Munich, Germany

"My relatives speak Saxon at speed and it looks nothing like the Hochdeutsch I read on TV. I put Captio AI in the middle of the table and it changed what family gatherings feel like."

Petra Wagner 🇩🇪
petra.w***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Dresden, Germany

"At home we switch between German and Turkish in the same sentence. Captio AI follows both so I'm not watching faces and guessing which language just appeared."

Mehmet Yıldız 🇩🇪
mehmet.y***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Berlin, Germany

"Our Verein evenings are a room full of Swabian and side conversations. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking near me so I can actually take part instead of burning out."

Sabine Fischer 🇩🇪
sabine.f***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Stuttgart, Germany

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in German.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store