Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Malayalam 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 Kerala family dinner — Onam sadya, a wedding feast, or a Sunday family meal — with relatives talking across the table in colloquial and formal Malayalam.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A house-warming celebration or a family reunion where the veranda fills with guests and multiple conversations run in parallel.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends from college over chai and snacks, with fast conversation ranging across careers, family, and gossip.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community gathering at a church, mosque, or local association in Kerala where announcements and discussion happen in Malayalam.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a family table — grandparents in Malabar Malayalam, parents in standard Thiruvananthapuram speech, children mixing in English.

🏠Shared living situations

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Malayalam
89.3%

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.

Malayalam

Why Malayalam is hard to understand

Retroflex series

  • Dental, alveolar, and retroflex — all look identical on lips
  • Malayalam phonemically distinguishes dental, alveolar, and retroflex articulations for multiple consonant classes. These three-way distinctions are produced entirely by tongue tip position and create no visible difference in lip shape. At a family dinner, this invisible three-way contrast removes phonemic information that only a complete audio signal can recover.

Geminate consonants

  • Short and long consonants change meaning — same lip closure
  • Malayalam has phonemic gemination: a short /t/ and a long /tt/ produce different words, as do /k/ and /kk/. Both are produced with the same brief lip closure, differing only in duration. At natural conversational pace, the durational distinction collapses and minimal pairs become visually identical.

Northern-Southern dialect gap

  • Malabar and Thiruvananthapuram Malayalam sound different
  • Northern (Malabar) Malayalam and southern (Thiruvananthapuram/Kochi) Malayalam differ in vowel realization, consonant quality, and prosody. A deaf person from Kozhikode reading lips of relatives from Trivandrum at the same family gathering faces a genuinely different phonological inventory.

Formal-colloquial diglossia

  • Literary and spoken Malayalam are two different registers
  • There is a sharp divide between literary/formal Malayalam and the colloquial spoken variety. Educated Keralites switch between registers at the same table — formal speech with elders, colloquial with cousins — without signalling the shift. A deaf person cannot anticipate which register is active.

Manglish code-switching

  • Urban Kerala gatherings mix Malayalam and English continuously
  • Urban Kerala gatherings — particularly among younger and educated speakers — freely integrate English into Malayalam mid-sentence (called Manglish). The phonological system of any given phrase is unpredictable: a sentence may begin in Malayalam and end in English without any pause or signal.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Kerala and the Malayalam-speaking world: the scale of daily exclusion

The State Initiative on Disabilities Survey (2015) found that 2.32% of Kerala's population is affected by some form of disability, with 60,925 persons classified as hearing disabled under the Persons with Disabilities Act. Nationally, India carries one of the world's largest burdens of hearing disability: an estimated 63 million people have significant hearing loss, representing the second most common disability category. Among children under six, 476,075 are estimated to have some degree of hearing loss. Research on Malayalam-speaking persons with hearing loss shows that vowel identification is a primary challenge — individuals with hearing loss show significantly reduced ability to identify spoken disyllabic Malayalam words compared to hearing controls, compounding the difficulty of real-world social settings.

Access to hearing rehabilitation in Kerala is improving through NPPCD outreach and cochlear implant programmes at major hospitals, but service gaps remain severe in rural districts. The audiometrist-to-population ratio nationally stands at approximately 1:500,000, and the speech therapist-to-deaf-population ratio is 1:200. For deaf and hard-of-hearing Keralites, the challenge of navigating social life is compounded by Malayalam's phonological complexity: formal and colloquial registers differ substantially, and urban Manglish code-switching adds a layer of unpredictability that no lip-reading strategy alone can resolve.

Captio AI captions Malayalam conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at an Onam sadya or a multigenerational gathering in Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode, or in the Gulf diaspora can follow every story and announcement as it is spoken, without needing someone to relay the conversation.

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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 our Onam sadya the whole family sits together and everyone talks at once. With Captio AI I could follow the conversation at my end of the table — something I hadn't managed in years."

Anjali M. 🇮🇳
anjali.m***@gmail.com
Thiruvananthapuram, moderate bilateral loss

"My northern Kerala relatives speak very differently from my Thiruvananthapuram family. The app handled both accents at the same family gathering and I didn't have to guess anymore."

Suresh N. 🇮🇳
suresh.n***@gmail.com
Kozhikode, severe loss since childhood

"Malayali community gatherings in Dubai are full of Manglish and different dialects. Captio AI followed the Malayalam-English switching without missing anything important."

Priya K. 🇦🇪
priya.k***@gmail.com
Dubai, profound loss, Malayali diaspora

"My family mixes formal and colloquial Malayalam constantly. The app kept up with the register shifts at our wedding reception — I stayed part of the evening instead of watching from the side."

Rajan T. 🇮🇳
rajan.t***@gmail.com
Kochi, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

"At our Onam sadya the whole family sits together and everyone talks at once. With Captio AI I could follow the conversation at my end of the table — something I hadn't managed in years."

Anjali M. 🇮🇳
anjali.m***@gmail.com
Thiruvananthapuram, moderate bilateral loss

"My northern Kerala relatives speak very differently from my Thiruvananthapuram family. The app handled both accents at the same family gathering and I didn't have to guess anymore."

Suresh N. 🇮🇳
suresh.n***@gmail.com
Kozhikode, severe loss since childhood

"Malayali community gatherings in Dubai are full of Manglish and different dialects. Captio AI followed the Malayalam-English switching without missing anything important."

Priya K. 🇦🇪
priya.k***@gmail.com
Dubai, profound loss, Malayali diaspora

"My family mixes formal and colloquial Malayalam constantly. The app kept up with the register shifts at our wedding reception — I stayed part of the evening instead of watching from the side."

Rajan T. 🇮🇳
rajan.t***@gmail.com
Kochi, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Malayalam.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store