Italian 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 Italian group settings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Italian 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 pranzo in Naples, Milan, or Palermo where multiple generations talk over each other and dialect-influenced Italian makes lip-reading the full meal very demanding. Captio AI on the table captions each voice so you follow from antipasto to dessert.
An aperitivo gathering with friends in Rome or Turin where the conversation moves quickly between subjects and accents from different parts of Italy. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking near your phone.
A family gathering where relatives from different regions — Milan, Naples, Sicily — speak their dialect-influenced Italian at the same table. Captio AI handles each regional variety in the same session.
A neighbourhood gathering or condominium meeting where multiple Italian residents contribute quickly with no formal captioning. Captio AI gives you a real-time transcript of every speaker.
A multigenerational celebration where grandparents speak dialect and younger members respond in standard Italian. Captio AI follows both registers without adjustment.
A social gathering at a bar or trattoria with friends where fast colloquial Italian, slang, and occasional English 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
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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 Italian is hard to understand
34 dialect families
- Italy's dialects span several mutually unintelligible language families at the same dinner table
- Italy has 34 documented dialect families across several mutually unintelligible language groups: Gallo-Italic (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian), Central Italian (Tuscan, Roman), Southern Italian (Neapolitan, Calabrese), Sicilian, and Sardinian. At a family gathering in Milan or Turin — where southerners moved for work and where multiple regional origins are common — several dialect-influenced Italians appear at the same table. A deaf person calibrated to standard Italian encounters a different phonological environment each time a regional dialect appears.
Dialect-Italian switching
- Southern Italian grandparents switch between dialect and standard Italian without signal
- In southern and central Italy, local dialects remain actively used, especially among older speakers. Family gatherings in Naples, Palermo, Bari, or rural areas often include grandparents speaking dialect (Neapolitan, Sicilian, Calabrese) and grandchildren responding in standard Italian — with switches unannounced. For a deaf person, the shift from standard Italian (which they may have prepared for) to Neapolitan dialect is a complete phonological environment change: different phonemes, different vocabulary, different prosody.
Gemination (double consonants)
- Italian double consonants change word meaning but collapse in fast social speech
- Italian phonology includes gemination — doubled consonants that distinguish words: 'fato' (fate) vs 'fatto' (done), 'pala' (shovel) vs 'palla' (ball), 'casa' (house) vs 'cassa' (chest). Double consonants produce a longer hold visible in very careful speech but extremely subtle at normal social pace. In fast casual Italian at a family gathering, gemination reduces and these distinctions collapse — a deaf person cannot recover them from lip movement in a fast group conversation.
Fast Southern speech with apocope
- Southern Italian speech drops word-final vowels in casual speech — creating a different phonological shape
- Southern Italian dialects and southern-influenced standard Italian feature apocope — dropping of unstressed word-final vowels in fast speech: 'questo' → 'quest'', 'quello' → 'quel''. Neapolitan and Calabrese speech particularly features this in casual registers. For a deaf person lip-reading Italian, word-final vowels provide key parsing cues — their removal changes the visible word shape and makes segmentation harder.
Italian-English mixing
- Urban Italian gatherings among educated and younger speakers mix Italian and English
- In educated urban Italian circles and among younger speakers, English vocabulary appears in casual conversation: 'Hai fatto il check-in?' 'Domani ho una call con il team.' The switch is unannounced and carries specific vocabulary that a lip-reader cannot anticipate. In Italian tech, business, and academic circles, this mixing is frequent enough to be a characteristic register of social gatherings.
Download for free
Download on theApp Store3.5 million hearing-impaired in Italy. LIS only officially recognised in 2021.
Approximately 3.5 million Italians have some form of hearing loss, with around 70,000 severely deaf. A study on the prevalence of hearing loss among Italian adults found rates consistent with European averages — with hearing loss rising significantly with age in a country that has one of the oldest populations in Europe. Italian Sign Language (LIS) was officially recognised only in 2021, making Italy one of the later Western European countries to formalise sign language rights — a delay that left generations of deaf Italians without formal language recognition during their formative years.
Despite LIS recognition, interpreter provision in informal social settings remains absent. The Italian family Sunday lunch — a cultural institution as central to Italian life as any other — has no formal communication support for deaf or hard of hearing members. An EHIMA European hearing care report (2024) found that hearing aid adoption across Southern and Eastern Europe remains significantly below Northern European rates, with cost barriers and social stigma limiting uptake. In Italy, as across much of Europe, the majority of people with significant hearing loss navigate everyday social life without any assistive technology.
Captio AI captions Italian in real time — across standard Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian-influenced, and northern Italian varieties — so the Sunday pranzo, the aperitivo with friends, and the family celebration in the village are conversations a deaf or hard of hearing person can follow without having to ask grandparents to stop speaking in dialect.
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
"Neapolitan dialect at a family Sunday lunch is completely different from standard Italian and my relatives don't switch for anyone. Captio AI on the table means I follow the whole meal."
"Milan gatherings with relatives from Sicily and Calabria become multilingual in ways nobody announces. Captio AI captions the Italian sections and I know when the dialect shift happens."
"Roman Italian at a large family lunch is fast and overlapping and everyone talks at once. Captio AI gave me my family conversations back."
"Sicilian family gatherings switch between Italian and Sicilian without warning. Captio AI captures the Italian conversations accurately. I'm part of the Sunday lunch again."
"Neapolitan dialect at a family Sunday lunch is completely different from standard Italian and my relatives don't switch for anyone. Captio AI on the table means I follow the whole meal."
"Milan gatherings with relatives from Sicily and Calabria become multilingual in ways nobody announces. Captio AI captions the Italian sections and I know when the dialect shift happens."
"Roman Italian at a large family lunch is fast and overlapping and everyone talks at once. Captio AI gave me my family conversations back."
"Sicilian family gatherings switch between Italian and Sicilian without warning. Captio AI captures the Italian conversations accurately. I'm part of the Sunday lunch again."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Keep up with the group in Italian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store