Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Portuguese 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🍽️Family dinners

A Sunday churrasco in São Paulo or Rio where the whole family and friend group gathers — grilling, talking, and laughing all at once. Captio AI on the table captions whoever is speaking near your phone so you follow the full afternoon.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A family Sunday lunch in Lisbon or Porto where fast European Portuguese with swallowed unstressed vowels runs together. Captio AI handles both European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Friend catch-ups

A gathering with friends at a bar in Rio or São Paulo, with music in the background and fast carioca or paulistano Portuguese filling the room. Captio AI cuts through the noise and captions the conversation.

🌍Multilingual groups

A multigenerational family gathering where a grandparent from the Northeast speaks with a Nordestino accent and grandchildren from São Paulo speak paulistano. Captio AI follows each regional variety.

👥Community and club meetings

A community association meeting, school parents' evening, or neighbourhood gathering where multiple contributors speak quickly in Portuguese with no formal captioning. Captio AI gives you a real-time transcript.

🏠Shared living situations

A gathering with friends where Brazilian Portuguese mixes with English and the conversation moves fast. Captio AI captions the full mix so you follow every exchange, not just the Portuguese sections.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Portuguese
95.2%

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.

Portuguese

Why Portuguese is hard to understand

Continental vowel reduction

  • European Portuguese swallows unstressed vowels that Brazilian Portuguese keeps open
  • European Portuguese (Portugal) reduces unstressed vowels dramatically in natural speech. Where Brazilian Portuguese has open, clear vowels, Lisbon and Porto colloquial swallows unstressed vowels almost entirely: 'obrigado' → 'brigadu', 'Portugal' → 'Prtugal' in very fast speech. For a deaf person calibrated to Brazilian Portuguese lip-reading, European Portuguese at speed presents a nearly unrecognisable set of mouth patterns — the same words look completely different on the lips.

Brazil's six regional accent groups

  • A Brazilian family gathering can include a Nordestino grandparent and a carioca grandchild
  • Brazil's six major regional accent groups — carioca (Rio), paulistano (São Paulo), nordestino (Northeast), gaúcho (South), mineiro (Minas Gerais), and the Amazon region — each have distinct vowel patterns, intonation, and vocabulary. A São Paulo family gathering with relatives from the Northeast, a spouse from Rio, and children raised locally presents multiple phonological systems at the same table, with no single accent as the baseline.

Fast carioca speech

  • Rio de Janeiro Portuguese is among the fastest casual speech varieties in the language
  • Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) Portuguese is notable for its speed in casual social settings. Syllables compress, vowels reduce in informal registers, and the distinctive carioca intonation — rising terminal contours on declarative sentences — adds prosodic complexity. In a noisy group setting, carioca running speech is difficult to lip-read even with preparation, and the pace makes reconstruction from visual information alone unreliable.

Register collapse

  • Family and friend gatherings use the fast colloquial register that differs substantially from formal Portuguese
  • Brazilian Portuguese has a formal written register, a media spoken register, and the fast colloquial of everyday social life. These differ substantially in grammar and vocabulary: 'está' → 'tá', 'você' → 'cê', 'nada' → elided, entire pronouns dropped. Family gatherings use the fast colloquial exclusively — a register that is not what formal learning resources prepare for and not what speech recognition training typically prioritises.

Portuguese-English mixing

  • Urban Brazilian and diaspora gatherings shift between Portuguese and English without announcement
  • In urban Brazil and among Portuguese diaspora communities in Europe and North America, English vocabulary appears regularly mid-sentence among educated and younger speakers. In tech, business, and educated urban social settings, English terms fill gaps without announcement. A deaf person tracking Portuguese loses the thread the moment the switch happens — and in São Paulo or Lisbon social gatherings, this can happen several times a minute.

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The Challenge

10.7 million in Brazil. And getting a hearing aid through the public system can take years.

In Brazil, 10.7 million people have some degree of hearing loss, with 2.3 million having severe or profound hearing loss — making Brazil's deaf and hard of hearing population one of the largest in the Americas. A population-based study published in PMC found a self-reported prevalence of hearing loss of approximately 5.2% in the general population, rising to 30.4% among older adults. These figures are likely underestimates: mild-to-moderate hearing loss often goes undiagnosed for years, and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics relies on self-report.

Access to hearing healthcare in Brazil is severely constrained. A 2024 review in the Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology identified that public health care provision for hearing aids involves bureaucratic processes that can take years, leaving many people with untreated progressive hearing loss that compounds over time. Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) was officially recognised in 2002, and Libras interpreters are required by law in some educational contexts — but provision in everyday social settings, community gatherings, and family life is entirely absent. Deaf and hard of hearing Brazilians navigate the Sunday churrasco, the family lunch, and the neighbourhood gathering without any support structure.

Captio AI captions Brazilian Portuguese in real time — across carioca, paulistano, nordestino, and gaúcho varieties — and European Portuguese as well, so the Sunday churrasco, the family lunch in Lisbon, and the São Paulo friend gathering are settings a deaf person can follow without being the one who always asks for a repeat.

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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

"Paulistano Portuguese at a family churrasco is fast and loud and everyone talks over each other. I used to go home mentally exhausted. Captio AI on the table means I actually enjoy those afternoons now."

Ana L. 🇧🇷
ana.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, São Paulo

"Carioca speech is some of the fastest in the world. A family gathering in Rio means nobody even considers slowing down. Captio AI keeps up."

João M. 🇧🇷
joao.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Rio de Janeiro

"European Portuguese at a family Sunday lunch is nearly impossible to lip-read. Vowels disappear, words blur together. Captio AI gives me the text of what was actually said."

Sofia P. 🇵🇹
sofia.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lisbon

"My family is Mineiro and Nordestino and they sound completely different. I was following neither. Captio AI follows both and I stopped dreading family gatherings."

Luisa F. 🇧🇷
luisa.f***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Belo Horizonte

"Paulistano Portuguese at a family churrasco is fast and loud and everyone talks over each other. I used to go home mentally exhausted. Captio AI on the table means I actually enjoy those afternoons now."

Ana L. 🇧🇷
ana.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, São Paulo

"Carioca speech is some of the fastest in the world. A family gathering in Rio means nobody even considers slowing down. Captio AI keeps up."

João M. 🇧🇷
joao.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Rio de Janeiro

"European Portuguese at a family Sunday lunch is nearly impossible to lip-read. Vowels disappear, words blur together. Captio AI gives me the text of what was actually said."

Sofia P. 🇵🇹
sofia.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lisbon

"My family is Mineiro and Nordestino and they sound completely different. I was following neither. Captio AI follows both and I stopped dreading family gatherings."

Luisa F. 🇧🇷
luisa.f***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Belo Horizonte

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Portuguese.

Captio AI is free to start

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