Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Kannada 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 Kannada family dinner — a Ugadi celebration, a wedding reception, or a Sunday family lunch — with multiple relatives talking at once.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A house party or a birthday celebration where friends and family fill the living room and conversations flow across the room.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends over filter coffee and snacks, with rapid conversation moving between Kannada and English.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community meeting at a local association, temple, or residents' welfare society where announcements are made and the group responds.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a family table — grandparents in a northern or southern Kannada dialect, parents in standard Bengaluru Kannada, grandchildren mixing in English.

🏠Shared living situations

A casual evening at a friend's home in Bengaluru or Mysuru where small groups form and talk freely.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Kannada
89.1%

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.

Kannada

Why Kannada is hard to understand

Caste-dialect variation

  • Phonology shifts speaker to speaker at community gatherings
  • Kannada has distinct caste varieties with differences in phonology, vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. At a community gathering or family event where relatives from multiple communities are present, a deaf person faces a different sound system from each speaker group — not merely an accent shift but a different phonological inventory.

Retroflex invisibility

  • Dental, alveolar, and retroflex consonants look the same
  • Kannada has a full retroflex consonant series. The distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation is carried entirely by tongue tip position. All three produce identical lip shapes, making these classes visually indistinguishable at a dinner table even for an experienced lip-reader.

Northern-Southern dialect gap

  • Dharwad and Mysuru Kannada sound different
  • Northern Kannada (Dharwad, Hubli varieties) and Southern Kannada (Mysuru, Mandya varieties) differ markedly in vowel realization and consonant quality. A deaf person familiar with Bengaluru or Mysuru speech encounters a substantially different sound landscape when relatives from Dharwad or Bidar speak at the same gathering.

Diglossia at the table

  • Formal and colloquial Kannada differ in phonology and grammar
  • Formal/literary Kannada used in media and education differs substantially from the colloquial spoken at home. Speakers shift register mid-conversation — between elders and children, between formal topics and casual ones — changing their phonological output without any visible signal that the register has switched.

Bengaluru trilingualism

  • Kannada, Hindi, and English shift unpredictably
  • Bengaluru social gatherings routinely mix Kannada, Hindi, and English in the same utterance — a pattern sometimes called Kanglish. A deaf person cannot apply one lip-reading strategy when three phonological systems alternate unpredictably mid-sentence.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Karnataka and the Kannada-speaking world: the scale of daily exclusion

India's National Survey of Disabled Persons estimates 291 persons per 100,000 population have severe-to-profound hearing loss. Hearing disability is the second most common disability category nationally, affecting an estimated 63 million people. Karnataka has been among the states actively implementing the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness (NPPCD), including neonatal screening and community outreach camps. Despite these programmes, the audiometrist-to-population ratio nationally stands at approximately 1:500,000 — meaning most deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Karnataka's towns and districts have no local access to professional hearing support.

Access to sign language interpretation in community and social settings in Karnataka is effectively absent outside of specialised institutions. For the deaf and hard-of-hearing population in Bengaluru — a city of over 13 million whose social life increasingly mixes Kannada, Hindi, and English — navigating family gatherings, community events, and neighbourhood meetings without real-time captioning means relying on partial lip-reading of one of India's phonologically most complex Dravidian languages. Rural Karnataka, where northern and southern dialect variation is most pronounced, faces the greatest service gaps.

Captio AI captions Kannada conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at a Ugadi celebration or a multigenerational dinner in Bengaluru, Mysuru, or Dharwad can follow every story and announcement as it is spoken, across whichever Kannada variety or language mix is at the table.

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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

"At family gatherings in Bengaluru everyone mixes Kannada, Hindi, and English constantly. Captio AI followed all three — I stopped missing the conversations across the table."

Kavitha R. 🇮🇳
kavitha.r***@gmail.com
Bengaluru, moderate bilateral loss

"My relatives from Dharwad speak very differently from my Mysuru family. The app handled both at our Ugadi dinner — I finally caught what my northern Karnataka cousins were saying."

Suresh P. 🇮🇳
suresh.p***@gmail.com
Mysuru, severe loss since childhood

"The conversation at community gatherings here mixes Tulu, Kannada, and English. Captio AI gave me real-time captions through the whole event — I was part of it instead of catching fragments."

Deepa M. 🇮🇳
deepa.m***@gmail.com
Mangaluru, profound loss, wears cochlear implant

"Northern Kannada moves fast and the local dialect is different from standard. Captio AI handled my family's speech accurately at a wedding celebration — I didn't miss a toast."

Ramesh B. 🇮🇳
ramesh.b***@gmail.com
Hubli, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

"At family gatherings in Bengaluru everyone mixes Kannada, Hindi, and English constantly. Captio AI followed all three — I stopped missing the conversations across the table."

Kavitha R. 🇮🇳
kavitha.r***@gmail.com
Bengaluru, moderate bilateral loss

"My relatives from Dharwad speak very differently from my Mysuru family. The app handled both at our Ugadi dinner — I finally caught what my northern Karnataka cousins were saying."

Suresh P. 🇮🇳
suresh.p***@gmail.com
Mysuru, severe loss since childhood

"The conversation at community gatherings here mixes Tulu, Kannada, and English. Captio AI gave me real-time captions through the whole event — I was part of it instead of catching fragments."

Deepa M. 🇮🇳
deepa.m***@gmail.com
Mangaluru, profound loss, wears cochlear implant

"Northern Kannada moves fast and the local dialect is different from standard. Captio AI handled my family's speech accurately at a wedding celebration — I didn't miss a toast."

Ramesh B. 🇮🇳
ramesh.b***@gmail.com
Hubli, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Kannada.

Captio AI is free to start

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