Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Polish 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🍽️Family dinners

A Polish family dinner — imieniny, a name day celebration, Christmas Eve wigilia, or a Sunday obiad — with multiple relatives talking over each other.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A birthday party or backyard barbecue where friends catch up freely, conversation shifts topics quickly, and everyone has something to say.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends over bigos and beer, with rapid conversation jumping between current events, shared memories, and family news.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community meeting at a Polish association, parish hall, or local club where announcements are made and the group responds freely.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a family meal — grandparents in regional Silesian or Malopolska Polish, parents in standard Polish, grandchildren mixing in English.

🏠Shared living situations

A casual evening in a neighbourhood bar, a friend's living room, or a local café where small groups form and talk freely.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Polish
94%

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.

Polish

Why Polish is hard to understand

Consonant cluster density

  • Four consonants in a row, all before the first vowel
  • Polish permits up to four consonants at a word's start and six in the middle — words like wstrząs or bezwzględny produce a rapid cascade of tongue and lip movements too compressed to track visually. At a family gathering, where speech moves at social pace, these clusters become an unresolvable blur.

Three sibilant series

  • Sz, s, and ś look the same from across a table
  • Polish has three distinct sibilant series — sz/ż, s/z, and ś/ź — that differ in tongue blade position. These produce nearly identical lip shapes. A deaf person lip-reading Polish must distinguish three classes of fricative that are visually homophonous, making minimal pairs indistinguishable.

Dialect sibilant mergers

  • Mazurzenie collapses the distinction in some dialects
  • Silesian, Mazovian, and some Malopolska dialects exhibit mazurzenie — a merger of all three sibilant series into one. A deaf person trained on standard Warsaw Polish encounters a completely different sibilant landscape when relatives from Silesia or rural Mazovia speak at the same table.

Final devoicing

  • Word-final consonant pairs become identical on lips
  • Polish devoices final consonants in natural speech — b→p, d→t, g→k. The word grób (grave) and grub (ruffian) are pronounced identically word-finally, and their lip shapes are the same. At a dinner table, final-position minimal pairs are fully visually ambiguous.

Palatalization cascade

  • Consonants shift articulation point invisibly before front vowels
  • Polish has pervasive palatalization: consonants change their tongue articulation before front vowels in ways that are invisible from the outside. The external lip shape does not change, but the acoustic signal does — leaving a deaf person with no visual cue to the phonemic shift.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Poland: the scale of daily exclusion

Poland's Universal Neonatal Hearing Screening Program, one of Europe's most comprehensive, has registered over 7 million children since its launch — and in 2021 alone covered 96% of all newborns born in the country. Among 3.5 million children screened in the program's early years, 5,443 were found to have hearing impairment — a rate of approximately 2.97 per 1,000, including sensorineural, conductive, and mixed losses. The adult hearing loss population is growing: among patients qualified for hearing aids in Poland, more than half are over 70 years old, and demand for hearing rehabilitation has expanded significantly across the decade.

Despite strong screening infrastructure, access to rehabilitation and social support for deaf and hard-of-hearing adults in Poland remains uneven. Polish Sign Language (PJM) received legal recognition only in 2011, and while deaf adults are entitled to sign language interpretation in public services, interpreter availability in community settings — family events, social gatherings, local meetings — is effectively nil. Deaf Poles who rely on lip-reading navigate family dinners and community events in one of Europe's most phonologically complex languages, with dense consonant clusters and three sibilant series that are near-impossible to distinguish visually.

Captio AI captions Polish conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at a wigilia table or a summer backyard gathering in Warsaw, Kraków, or Wrocław can follow every story and toast as it is spoken, without needing an interpreter or missing the conversation.

Download for free

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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

"Our wigilia is twelve dishes and twelve relatives talking at once. Captio AI followed the whole table — I finally caught every story my grandmother was telling."

Magda W. 🇵🇱
magda.w***@gmail.com
Warsaw, moderate bilateral loss since childhood

"My family from Silesia speaks very differently from my Warsaw relatives. The app handled both at the same name day celebration without getting confused."

Tomek K. 🇵🇱
tomek.k***@gmail.com
Kraków, severe high-frequency loss

"Polish community events in London are loud and fast. Captio AI meant I could follow the conversations at my table instead of smiling at things I couldn't hear."

Zosia P. 🇬🇧
zosia.p***@gmail.com
London, profound loss, Polish diaspora

"At birthday parties the conversation jumps too fast for me to lip-read Polish consonant clusters. The app filled every gap — I stayed in the conversation the whole evening."

Bartek N. 🇵🇱
bartek.n***@gmail.com
Gdańsk, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

"Our wigilia is twelve dishes and twelve relatives talking at once. Captio AI followed the whole table — I finally caught every story my grandmother was telling."

Magda W. 🇵🇱
magda.w***@gmail.com
Warsaw, moderate bilateral loss since childhood

"My family from Silesia speaks very differently from my Warsaw relatives. The app handled both at the same name day celebration without getting confused."

Tomek K. 🇵🇱
tomek.k***@gmail.com
Kraków, severe high-frequency loss

"Polish community events in London are loud and fast. Captio AI meant I could follow the conversations at my table instead of smiling at things I couldn't hear."

Zosia P. 🇬🇧
zosia.p***@gmail.com
London, profound loss, Polish diaspora

"At birthday parties the conversation jumps too fast for me to lip-read Polish consonant clusters. The app filled every gap — I stayed in the conversation the whole evening."

Bartek N. 🇵🇱
bartek.n***@gmail.com
Gdańsk, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Polish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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