Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Norwegian live captions and productivity tool for group settings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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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 Norwegian family gathering — a Christmas Eve dinner (julekveld) or a summer birthday party — brings multiple generations around a long table, with everyone talking in their own regional dialect.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

An evening with Norwegian friends at someone's home, with food, wine, and the kind of long, warm conversation that runs comfortably from early evening into the night.

Friend catch-ups

Meeting old friends over kaffe og kake in a Norwegian kitchen or cafe, the familiar ritual of a long unhurried catch-up about family, work, and the world.

🌍Multilingual groups

A neighbourhood meeting or dugnad planning session where several people speak at once in their local dialect and decisions are made informally.

👥Community and club meetings

A Sunday meal where grandparents, parents, and children eat together — each generation speaking its own regional variety of Norwegian at the same table.

🏠Shared living situations

A cabin weekend (hyttetur) with friends — one of Norway's most typical group social settings, where long conversations happen around a wood stove or on the cabin terrace.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Norwegian
91.6%

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.

Norwegian

Why Norwegian is hard to understand

Radical Dialect Diversity

  • No standard spoken Norwegian — eight ways to say I
  • Norwegian has no standard spoken form. Every speaker uses their regional dialect, and these dialects differ substantially in phonology, vocabulary, and prosody. The pronoun for I (jeg) has eight or more distinct regional pronunciations. A deaf person lip-reading across a table with guests from Bergen, Tromsø, and Stavanger is, in effect, lip-reading in different languages.

Pitch Accent

  • Two tones, completely invisible on lips
  • Norwegian uses two pitch accents (tone 1 and tone 2) on lexical words, distinguishing minimal pairs. These tonal distinctions are auditory-only — they leave no mark on the lips — and are lost entirely to lip-readers, who cannot distinguish the word pairs that hearing people separate automatically.

Uvular vs. Alveolar R

  • Two R-sounds, same lip shape
  • In South and West Norway, r is realised as a uvular fricative produced deep in the throat. In North and East Norway, r is alveolar. The two sound nothing alike — but both produce ambiguous lip information. A deaf person encountering both variants at the same table is tracking two different sounds that look the same.

Retroflexion at Consonant Boundaries

  • Hidden consonant changes in alveolar dialects
  • In dialects with alveolar r, sequences of r followed by a dental consonant produce retroflex sounds — the tongue blade curls back. These retroflexes are produced behind the teeth, invisible on lips, and cause unexpected consonant shapes where a dental was expected.

Rapid Elision in Casual Speech

  • Norwegian contractions at social pace
  • Norwegian informal speech contracts heavily. Particles, determiners, and negators merge with adjacent words at pace. In a lively group gathering, the rate of contraction and reduction makes word identification from lip patterns alone nearly impossible.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Norway: the scale of daily exclusion

In Norway, an estimated 15 percent of the adult population — approximately 650,000 people out of 5.4 million — experience permanent hearing loss, a figure the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has noted is expected to rise as the population ages. Research from the HUNT Study, one of the largest population health surveys in Europe, found that hearing loss in Norway is socioeconomically patterned: people in manual occupations and with lower educational attainment are significantly more likely to develop hearing loss and significantly less likely to use hearing aids.

Hearing aid use in Norway increased from 4.2 percent in 1997 to 5.8 percent in 2018 among the general adult population — but even among those with disabling hearing loss (at or above 35 dB), more than a third do not use a hearing aid. Research consistently shows that hearing aids alone do not resolve the difficulty of following group conversations in noisy, multi-speaker environments like family gatherings, parties, and community meetings. Norwegian Sign Language is recognised as an official minority language, but relatively few deaf and hard of hearing people who acquired their hearing loss in adulthood use sign language — leaving a large population underserved in daily social settings.

Captio AI captions Norwegian conversation in real time — including the radical dialect variation from a table where guests come from Bergen, Tromso, and Stavanger — so deaf and hard of hearing Norwegians can read every voice at the gathering, without relying on the one speaker who happens to face them.

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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

"Bergen Norwegians speak so differently from Oslo — the pitch, the vowels, the speed. Captio AI handled our family's Bergensk at Christmas dinner and I finally read what my grandmother was saying."

Ingrid H. 🇳🇴
ingrid.h***@gmail.com
Bergen, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"Northern Norwegian is a completely different sound from southern dialects. I was always lost at family gatherings where people came from different parts of Norway. Captio AI reads the audio and I read the screen."

Olav S. 🇳🇴
olav.s***@gmail.com
Tromso, hard of hearing since adolescence

"The hyttetur with friends is the best social gathering in Norwegian life — and also the one where I missed the most conversation. Now I read every sentence, including the fast jokes."

Kari M. 🇳🇴
kari.m***@gmail.com
Stavanger, deaf since birth

"Norwegian has no standard spoken form — everyone speaks their own dialect. Captio AI handles the variation better than any other tool I tried. It is the first time I have actually followed a Norwegian group conversation."

Bjorn L. 🇳🇴
bjorn.l***@gmail.com
Oslo, progressive hearing loss

"Bergen Norwegians speak so differently from Oslo — the pitch, the vowels, the speed. Captio AI handled our family's Bergensk at Christmas dinner and I finally read what my grandmother was saying."

Ingrid H. 🇳🇴
ingrid.h***@gmail.com
Bergen, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"Northern Norwegian is a completely different sound from southern dialects. I was always lost at family gatherings where people came from different parts of Norway. Captio AI reads the audio and I read the screen."

Olav S. 🇳🇴
olav.s***@gmail.com
Tromso, hard of hearing since adolescence

"The hyttetur with friends is the best social gathering in Norwegian life — and also the one where I missed the most conversation. Now I read every sentence, including the fast jokes."

Kari M. 🇳🇴
kari.m***@gmail.com
Stavanger, deaf since birth

"Norwegian has no standard spoken form — everyone speaks their own dialect. Captio AI handles the variation better than any other tool I tried. It is the first time I have actually followed a Norwegian group conversation."

Bjorn L. 🇳🇴
bjorn.l***@gmail.com
Oslo, progressive hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Norwegian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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