Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Latvian 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

Latvian family celebrations — Jāņi, Christmas, name-day dinners — bring multiple generations around a long table. Captio AI keeps the full conversation visible for deaf and hard-of-hearing family members across the room.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

House parties and neighbourhood gatherings in Riga, Liepāja, or a smaller Latvian town involve overlapping voices and fast exchanges. Captio AI follows each speaker in real time so deaf guests can join rather than observe.

Friend catch-ups

A coffee catch-up with Latvian friends is fast and easy to miss when background noise rises. Captio AI captions every exchange so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can contribute at the right moment.

🌍Multilingual groups

Community events, pagasts meetings, and local association gatherings use fast conversational Latvian with regional expressions. Captio AI makes the full discussion followable without a professional interpreter.

👥Community and club meetings

When grandparents speak Latgalian and grandchildren use standard Latvian, the phonological gap is significant. Captio AI captions both varieties and keeps the multigenerational table connected.

🏠Shared living situations

Gatherings at a singing festival, a sports club, or a diaspora community event involve rapid exchanges between familiar members. Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard-of-hearing member part of every conversation.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Latvian
89.9%

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.

Latvian

Why Latvian is hard to understand

Three-tone pitch accent

  • Level, falling, and broken tones — all invisible
  • Latvian has three prosodic tones: level, falling, and broken (laryngealized). These tones distinguish words that look identical on the lips — the same vowel with a different pitch contour is a completely different word. The broken tone involves a laryngeal catch that is entirely hidden in the throat, making it impossible to detect by sight.

12-vowel length contrasts

  • Short and long vowels look the same
  • Latvian has 12 vowel phonemes — six short and six long — where length alone distinguishes meaning. Long vowels appear visually indistinguishable from their short counterparts on the lips. A deaf lip-reader cannot tell 'gals' (end) from 'gāls' without any acoustic signal to draw on.

Latgalian gap

  • Eastern Latvian reads like a different language
  • Latgalian, the High Latvian dialect of eastern Latvia, is sufficiently distinct from standard Latvian that it has its own written standard and is sometimes considered a separate language. At a family gathering with relatives from Latgale, the vocabulary and phonology shift enough to break a lip-reading pattern built on standard Latvian.

Palatalized consonants

  • Soft consonant pairs invisible on the face
  • Latvian consonants come in palatalized and non-palatalized pairs — /n/ vs /ņ/, /l/ vs /ļ/, /k/ vs /ķ/ — where the distinction is produced by the tongue against the hard palate, entirely behind the lips. These pairs change word meaning but are visually indistinguishable from each other.

Rapid casual reduction

  • Syllables and particles disappear at speed
  • Colloquial Latvian drops or shortens syllables aggressively in natural conversation. Pronouns like 'viņš' contract to 'viš', particles disappear, and word boundaries blur. At a family gathering where people talk across each other, these reductions layer on top of the tonal and length ambiguities.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss in Latvia: the scale of daily exclusion

The Latvian Association of the Deaf (LAD) estimates approximately 32,000 Latvians are at potential risk of social exclusion due to deafness or severely impaired hearing. Of these, only around 2,000 deaf people use Latvian Sign Language (LSL) as their primary means of communication — the much larger group of hard-of-hearing people often lack access either to sign language or to adequate captioning alternatives. An EU Regional Policy project in 2015 opened two dedicated rehabilitation centres in Riga and Liepāja, providing sign language interpretation services — but these facilities cannot meet the daily needs of 32,000 people scattered across the country.

Latvian Sign Language gained formal legal recognition through Latvia's Official Language Law in 1999, yet a persistent shortage of qualified LSL interpreters means that legally recognised rights are often impossible to exercise in practice. Spontaneous social settings — family gatherings, community events, neighbourhood meetings — have no structured captioning provision at all, leaving deaf and hard-of-hearing Latvians dependent on goodwill from hearing companions to relay what is being said.

Captio AI captions Latvian conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a family Jāņi celebration or a community gathering in Riga without waiting for a scarce interpreter or asking others to slow down.

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

"Jāņi with the whole family is my favourite and hardest day of the year. Everyone talking over each other, the fire crackling. Captio AI lets me read the whole conversation and actually be part of it."

Laima O. 🇱🇻
laima.o***@gmail.com
Riga, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"My grandparents from Latgale speak so differently from standard Latvian. I used to miss most of what they said. Captio AI captures it all. Family visits feel real now."

Jānis B. 🇱🇻
janis.b***@gmail.com
Liepāja, deaf since childhood

"At Latvian diaspora events in London everyone talks very fast and the room is loud. Captio AI follows every speaker and I have not felt excluded at a community gathering in months."

Aija K. 🇬🇧
aija.k***@gmail.com
London diaspora, bilateral hearing loss

"The tonal pitch in Latvian has always been impossible for me to catch. I miss the difference between words that sound similar. Captio AI gives me the transcript and the ambiguity disappears."

Kārlis R. 🇱🇻
karlis.r***@gmail.com
Jūrmala, age-related hearing loss

"Jāņi with the whole family is my favourite and hardest day of the year. Everyone talking over each other, the fire crackling. Captio AI lets me read the whole conversation and actually be part of it."

Laima O. 🇱🇻
laima.o***@gmail.com
Riga, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"My grandparents from Latgale speak so differently from standard Latvian. I used to miss most of what they said. Captio AI captures it all. Family visits feel real now."

Jānis B. 🇱🇻
janis.b***@gmail.com
Liepāja, deaf since childhood

"At Latvian diaspora events in London everyone talks very fast and the room is loud. Captio AI follows every speaker and I have not felt excluded at a community gathering in months."

Aija K. 🇬🇧
aija.k***@gmail.com
London diaspora, bilateral hearing loss

"The tonal pitch in Latvian has always been impossible for me to catch. I miss the difference between words that sound similar. Captio AI gives me the transcript and the ambiguity disappears."

Kārlis R. 🇱🇻
karlis.r***@gmail.com
Jūrmala, age-related hearing loss

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Latvian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store