Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hebrew live captions and productivity tool for group settings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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 Shabbat dinner or holiday meal — Rosh Hashanah, Passover Seder, or Hanukkah gathering — with family filling the table and multiple conversations running at once.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A birthday party or family celebration where the living room fills with guests and groups form and reform throughout the evening.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends over hummus and coffee, with rapid conversation moving between Hebrew and sometimes English or Arabic.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community gathering at a synagogue, community centre, or neighbourhood association where announcements are made and the group responds.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a Shabbat table — grandparents from an Ashkenazi or Mizrahi tradition speaking differently, parents in modern Israeli Hebrew, grandchildren mixing in English.

🏠Shared living situations

A casual Friday evening at a friend's home or a neighbourhood rooftop gathering where small groups form and conversations flow freely.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hebrew
92.5%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

Hebrew

Why Hebrew is hard to understand

Pharyngeal consonants

  • Het and ayin are produced in the throat with no lip movement
  • Traditional Hebrew has the pharyngeal consonants het /ħ/ and ayin /ʕ/ — produced deep in the throat with essentially no lip, jaw, or tongue-tip movement visible from outside. In Mizrahi Hebrew communities, these sounds remain phonemically active. At a multigenerational gathering, a deaf person finds some speakers using sounds with zero visual signature that change the meaning of words.

Ashkenazi-Mizrahi phonological split

  • Two major Hebrew speech traditions differ at the phoneme level
  • Ashkenazi Hebrew (originating with Eastern European Jewish communities) and Mizrahi Hebrew (from North African and Middle Eastern communities) differ in consonant inventory, vowel quality, and stress placement. Israeli families that span these communities bring different phonological systems to the same Shabbat dinner table, and a deaf person training on one tradition faces a different visual landscape from relatives using the other.

Unvoweled script mismatch

  • Deaf readers supply vowels from phonological knowledge — which varies by community
  • Standard written Hebrew omits vowel diacritics (nikkud). A deaf person who has developed reading strategies for Hebrew must supply vowels from phonological knowledge — but different communities supply different vowels for the same written word. Research specifically on Hebrew deaf readers has documented this as a significant comprehension challenge at the word level.

Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism

  • Mixed gatherings alternate between two phonologically distinct Semitic languages
  • In Arab-Israeli social contexts and in Israeli-Arab families, Hebrew and Arabic alternate mid-conversation. A deaf person at a mixed gathering faces two Semitic languages — each with pharyngeal and guttural consonants, but with different phoneme inventories — switching without predictable signal.

Fast colloquial reduction

  • Modern Israeli Hebrew reduces quickly in natural social speech
  • Modern Israeli Hebrew has undergone significant sound reduction in connected speech: consonants assimilate across word boundaries, unstressed syllables compress, and informal social speech runs words together rapidly. The gap between careful classroom pronunciation and natural fast-paced family conversation is wide enough to produce different visual lip patterns for the same words.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss in Israel: the scale of daily exclusion

According to the Israel Deaf Association and the Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 10,000 people in Israel are profoundly deaf, with an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 additional people living with significant hearing loss. One in 1,000 babies is born completely deaf and one in 200 with some form of hearing impairment. Israel has an active research tradition in the genetics of hearing loss: more than 20 genes have been identified as causing deafness in the Jewish-Israeli population, and rates of specific genetic variants vary by community background — Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and other communities each carry different founder variants at different frequencies.

Israel's Equal Rights for People with Disabilities Law mandates accessibility in employment, public transportation, healthcare, and government services, and organizations like Bekol — a self-help association founded and directed by people with hearing loss — work to improve social integration and legislative access. Despite this framework, many deaf and hard-of-hearing Israelis still struggle to access services and opportunities. Family social events — Shabbat dinners, holiday gatherings, birthday celebrations — are not covered by any formal interpretation or accessibility service. At a Passover Seder or a Rosh Hashanah dinner where multiple Hebrew dialects and sometimes Arabic are spoken, a deaf person navigates one of the world's few languages with actively used pharyngeal consonants that are invisible on the lips.

Captio AI captions Hebrew conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at a Shabbat dinner or a Seder in Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Jerusalem can follow every story, blessing, and debate as it is spoken, whether in Ashkenazi or Mizrahi Hebrew.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"At our Passover Seder my Ashkenazi grandparents and my Mizrahi relatives speak very differently. Captio AI followed both at the same table — I finally followed every part of the Haggadah discussion."

Tamar L. 🇮🇱
tamar.l***@gmail.com
Tel Aviv, moderate bilateral loss

"Fast colloquial Israeli Hebrew at family gatherings moves very differently from careful speech. The app kept up with my family's pace at a birthday celebration — I didn't miss a thing."

Yossi K. 🇮🇱
yossi.k***@gmail.com
Haifa, severe high-frequency loss since adolescence

"At community events our conversations mix Hebrew and sometimes Arabic. Captio AI followed the Hebrew side accurately — I stayed in the conversation instead of just watching."

Noa A. 🇮🇱
noa.a***@gmail.com
Jerusalem, profound loss

"At Israeli community gatherings here everyone talks at once and the conversation goes fast. Captio AI gave me real-time captions through the whole Shabbat dinner — I felt included for the first time."

David M. 🇺🇸
david.m***@gmail.com
New York, moderate loss, Israeli diaspora

"At our Passover Seder my Ashkenazi grandparents and my Mizrahi relatives speak very differently. Captio AI followed both at the same table — I finally followed every part of the Haggadah discussion."

Tamar L. 🇮🇱
tamar.l***@gmail.com
Tel Aviv, moderate bilateral loss

"Fast colloquial Israeli Hebrew at family gatherings moves very differently from careful speech. The app kept up with my family's pace at a birthday celebration — I didn't miss a thing."

Yossi K. 🇮🇱
yossi.k***@gmail.com
Haifa, severe high-frequency loss since adolescence

"At community events our conversations mix Hebrew and sometimes Arabic. Captio AI followed the Hebrew side accurately — I stayed in the conversation instead of just watching."

Noa A. 🇮🇱
noa.a***@gmail.com
Jerusalem, profound loss

"At Israeli community gatherings here everyone talks at once and the conversation goes fast. Captio AI gave me real-time captions through the whole Shabbat dinner — I felt included for the first time."

David M. 🇺🇸
david.m***@gmail.com
New York, moderate loss, Israeli diaspora

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Hebrew.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store