Tamil live captions and productivity tool for group settings
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Tamil group settings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Tamil speakers.
Follow whoever is speaking
- Captions the active voice at any moment
- Works at dinner tables, parties, and social gatherings
- Place the phone in the centre of the group
- Any accent, any pace
For multilingual groups
- Each person speaks their own language
- You read in yours, in real time
- 60+ languages, no switching
- For international families, mixed-language groups, travel
Transcribe any group conversation
- Record and get the full conversation in writing
- Organised by speaker
- Review who said what after the fact
- Any group size, any language
Key points from any group discussion
- Decisions and takeaways extracted automatically
- Useful for group meetings and community discussions
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
A Pongal or Diwali family gathering in Chennai, Coimbatore, or Madurai where relatives from different parts of Tamil Nadu speak their regional variety at full speed. Captio AI captions each voice so you follow the whole celebration.
A family Sunday lunch in Chennai where Tamil, English, and occasional Hindi appear in the same conversation and nobody marks the switches. Captio AI captions the full multilingual exchange.
A neighbourhood gathering or apartment complex event where multiple Tamil speakers contribute quickly with no formal captioning. Captio AI gives you a real-time transcript of every speaker.
A multigenerational family gathering where grandparents speak formal or regional Tamil and grandchildren speak fast colloquial Chennai Tamil with Tanglish. Captio AI follows both registers.
A Tamil diaspora community event in London, Toronto, or Sydney where Sri Lankan Tamil and Indian Tamil appear in the same gathering. Captio AI handles both varieties without adjustment.
A social gathering with friends at a filter coffee shop or tiffin restaurant where fast Tanglish makes lip-reading nearly impossible. Captio AI captions every exchange in real time.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
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.
Why Tamil is hard to understand
Formal-colloquial diglossia
- Written/formal Tamil and spoken colloquial Tamil are so different they function as separate systems
- Tamil has a strong diglossia between centamil (formal literary Tamil) used in writing, education, and media, and koṭuntamiḻ (colloquial spoken Tamil) used in everyday life. These are phonologically distinct: formal Tamil uses verb forms and vocabulary that do not appear in colloquial speech, and colloquial Tamil reduces verb endings, drops subjects, and uses contracted forms throughout. At a family gathering, only colloquial Tamil is spoken — but a deaf person trained on formal Tamil from school or media encounters a different phonological environment at every social gathering.
Sri Lankan vs Indian Tamil
- Jaffna Tamil and Chennai Tamil are phonologically distinct — a gap felt at every diaspora gathering
- Sri Lankan Tamil (Jaffna, Batticaloa) and Indian Tamil (Tamil Nadu) differ significantly in phonology, vocabulary, and prosody. Sri Lankan Tamil preserves certain consonant distinctions that have merged in Indian Tamil, and has phonological patterns from Sinhala contact. At diaspora gatherings mixing Sri Lankan and Indian Tamil families — common in the UK, Canada, and Australia — these differences appear in the same room. A deaf person calibrated to one variety encounters the other as a phonologically different language.
Kongu Tamil vowel elision
- Western Tamil Nadu gatherings speak a variety with more extensive vowel reduction
- Kongu Tamil (Coimbatore, Erode, Salem region) has more extensive vowel elision than Central Tamil, with word-final clusters simplifying further in fast speech. In a gathering where Kongu Tamil relatives attend alongside Chennai or Madurai Tamil speakers, the vowel reduction patterns differ. A deaf person lip-reading Central Tamil encounters a substantially different phonological environment in a Kongu family gathering, where the visual word shapes are different from what they expect.
Tanglish code-switching
- Tamil and English mix mid-sentence at virtually every urban and diaspora gathering
- In Chennai, Singapore, Malaysia, and across the Tamil diaspora, Tamil and English mix freely in everyday speech: 'Nee eppo varuva? I'll be there by 7.' 'Atha cinema paakka porom, shall we go at 6?' The switch is unannounced and carries specific content. For a deaf person tracking Tamil, the English segment breaks the visual comprehension chain — and in urban Tamil social settings, this switching can happen several times per minute.
Retroflex consonant series
- Tamil's retroflex sounds are produced where the lips cannot show them
- Tamil has an extensive retroflex consonant series (ட, ண, ர, ழ, ள) produced with the tongue curled back to touch the hard palate. These sounds are invisible on the lips — the visible articulators do not participate in retroflex production. Tamil distinguishes dental /n/ and /l/ from retroflex /ṇ/ and /ḷ/ — distinctions that are auditory and not recoverable from visual information in a fast group conversation.
Download for free
Download on theApp Store63 million in India with hearing impairment. Tamil Nadu leads India in deaf school provision but trails in everyday support.
India is home to approximately 63 million people with significant hearing impairment — 6.3% of the total population. Tamil Nadu has historically had the highest concentration of deaf schools in India, reflecting a long tradition of deaf education in the state. However, high provision of formal deaf education does not translate to support in informal social life. Research on India's disability estimates has found that official prevalence data significantly underestimates the real burden — the 2011 Census figure of 50.7 lakh people with hearing loss represents people who self-reported, which misses the many millions with mild or moderate loss who do not identify as disabled.
A systematic review of psychosocial challenges facing hearing-impaired people in India found consistent patterns of social isolation, withdrawal from family gatherings, and unsympathetic family attitudes across all states including Tamil Nadu. Sri Lanka — home to a significant Tamil-speaking deaf community — has audiological infrastructure concentrated in urban private centres, with government provision insufficient to cover the population. The Tamil deaf community spans multiple countries and sign language systems: Indian Sign Language (ISL), Sri Lankan Sign Language (SLSL), and sign varieties used in Singapore and Malaysia are all distinct, limiting cross-border support.
Captio AI captions Tamil in real time — across Chennai colloquial, Kongu Tamil, Sri Lankan Tamil, and Tanglish code-switching — so the Pongal family gathering, the Sunday lunch in Coimbatore, and the diaspora community event in London or Toronto are conversations a deaf or hard of hearing Tamil speaker can follow without tracking retroflex consonants and six-way vowel elision off the lips of fast-speaking relatives.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"Chennai family gatherings are fast colloquial Tamil with English thrown in and everybody talks over everybody. I used to follow maybe half of it. Captio AI on the table means I follow all of it."
"Jaffna Tamil is different enough from Chennai Tamil that diaspora gatherings were confusing in both directions. Captio AI handles both. It's the first time a community event has felt genuinely accessible to me."
"UK Tamil diaspora events mix Sri Lankan Tamil, Indian Tamil, and English constantly. Captio AI follows the Tamil in both varieties and I stop missing the parts where the conversation gets fastest."
"Kongu Tamil at my family gatherings has different vowel patterns from what I learned. Captio AI captions the real speech. It's not the formal Tamil — it's the fast family Tamil that I actually need."
"Chennai family gatherings are fast colloquial Tamil with English thrown in and everybody talks over everybody. I used to follow maybe half of it. Captio AI on the table means I follow all of it."
"Jaffna Tamil is different enough from Chennai Tamil that diaspora gatherings were confusing in both directions. Captio AI handles both. It's the first time a community event has felt genuinely accessible to me."
"UK Tamil diaspora events mix Sri Lankan Tamil, Indian Tamil, and English constantly. Captio AI follows the Tamil in both varieties and I stop missing the parts where the conversation gets fastest."
"Kongu Tamil at my family gatherings has different vowel patterns from what I learned. Captio AI captions the real speech. It's not the formal Tamil — it's the fast family Tamil that I actually need."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Keep up with the group in Tamil.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store