Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Telugu 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 Dasara or Ugadi family gathering in Vijayawada or Hyderabad where relatives from Coastal Andhra and Telangana both attend and speak their regional variety. Captio AI captions each voice so you follow the whole celebration.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A family Sunday lunch in Hyderabad where Telugu, Urdu loanwords, and English appear in the same sentence and nobody notices the transitions. Captio AI captions the full exchange.

Friend catch-ups

A neighbourhood gathering or apartment society event in Hyderabad where multiple Telugu speakers contribute quickly with no formal captioning. Captio AI gives you real-time captions of every speaker.

🌍Multilingual groups

A multigenerational family gathering where grandparents speak Coastal Andhra dialect and grandchildren speak Hyderabadi Telugu. Captio AI handles each variety in the same session.

👥Community and club meetings

A social gathering with friends at a tiffin centre or local restaurant where fast urban Telugu makes lip-reading very difficult. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking near your phone.

🏠Shared living situations

A community temple event or cultural association gathering where formal Telugu in the ceremony transitions to fast social conversation. Captio AI follows both registers.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Telugu
91.8%

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.

Telugu

Why Telugu is hard to understand

Andhra vs Telangana dialect

  • Coastal Andhra and Telangana Telugu are phonologically distinct at the family table
  • Telugu has two major spoken dialect groups: Coastal Andhra (Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam) and Telangana (Hyderabad), with Rayalaseema forming a third. These differ substantially in vocabulary, case markers, and verb endings — Telangana Telugu absorbs Urdu and Hindi words due to Hyderabadi historical influence, while Coastal Andhra retains classical vocabulary. A gathering where Andhra and Telangana relatives attend presents two phonological systems, and a deaf person calibrated to one encounters a different speech environment when the other appears.

Hyderabadi Telugu-Urdu mixing

  • Hyderabadi Telugu has absorbed Urdu vocabulary so thoroughly that everyday speech is a linguistic hybrid
  • In Telangana and Hyderabad, Urdu words appear in sentences that are otherwise Telugu — not as code-switching but as integrated borrowings so common that speakers don't register them as foreign. For a deaf person lip-reading Telugu, this produces an unpredictable vocabulary environment where known Telugu phonological patterns suddenly produce an Urdu word. The visual form of the lips does not signal which language the word comes from.

Telugu-English code-switching

  • Urban Hyderabad tech and educated gatherings mix Telugu and English constantly
  • In Hyderabad, Vijayawada, and Bengaluru's Telugu community, educated speakers move between Telugu and English mid-sentence: 'Aa meeting lo manager cheppadu that we need to revise everything.' In tech circles — Hyderabad is a major IT hub — this can happen multiple times per minute. A deaf person tracking Telugu loses the thread each time, and in Hyderabad social gatherings the switching is so frequent it cannot be anticipated.

Retroflex consonants

  • Telugu's retroflex sounds are produced where the lips cannot show them
  • Telugu has a rich retroflex consonant series (ట ఠ డ ఢ ణ ళ ఱ) produced with the tongue curled back to touch the hard palate. These sounds are invisible on the lips — the visible articulators (lips, teeth, tongue tip) do not participate in retroflex production. For a deaf person lip-reading Telugu, this entire consonant class is not recoverable from visual information, yet it appears in high-frequency vocabulary throughout everyday speech.

Social register drop

  • The Telugu of family gatherings is substantially faster and more reduced than any formal variety
  • Telugu has formal and colloquial registers that differ substantially. At a family gathering in Telugu, case markers are dropped, pronouns omitted, and verb forms contracted to their shortest possible shape. The formal Telugu of education or media is not the language of the family lunch or the neighbourhood event — and a deaf person trained on the formal variety encounters a phonologically different register at every social gathering.

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The Challenge

63 million in India with hearing impairment. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana together carry millions of those cases.

India is home to approximately 63 million people with significant hearing impairment — 6.3% of the total population. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with a combined population exceeding 90 million, carry a proportional share of this burden. The National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness (NPPCD) is active across both states, but clinical provision does not address everyday social life — the family gathering, the neighbourhood event, and the community celebration where communication exclusion is most felt.

A review of challenges facing hearing-impaired people in India found consistent patterns of social isolation from family and friends and unsympathetic attitudes in social settings — outcomes particularly acute in the large multigenerational family contexts that are central to Telugu social life. India has only around 250 trained sign language interpreters for its entire deaf population, meaning professional communication support is simply unavailable for any informal social setting. Telugu Sign Language exists as a community resource, but it reaches only a fraction of Telugu deaf and hard of hearing people.

Captio AI captions Telugu in real time — including Telangana dialect, Coastal Andhra varieties, Hyderabadi Telugu-Urdu mixing, and Telugu-English code-switching — so the Dasara family gathering, the Sunday lunch in Vijayawada, and the Hyderabad neighbourhood event are conversations a deaf or hard of hearing Telugu speaker can follow without watching faces and guessing at three-language mixing.

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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

"Hyderabad gatherings are Telugu-Urdu-English all in one sentence and nobody signals the switch. I was missing everything. Captio AI follows the whole mix."

Sravya R. 🇮🇳
sravya.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Hyderabad

"Coastal Andhra Telugu at a family Dasara gathering is fast and specific and nothing like Hyderabadi Telugu. Captio AI handles both so I follow my relatives wherever they're from."

Kiran B. 🇮🇳
kiran.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Vijayawada

"Family gatherings with three generations of Telugu speakers — each speaking a different register — used to leave me exhausted. Captio AI on the table means I stay in the conversation the whole time."

Ananya P. 🇮🇳
ananya.p***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Visakhapatnam

"Telangana dialect is very different from standard Telugu and I couldn't lip-read it at all. Captio AI captions the real speech. It's not the textbook version — it's what my family actually says."

Rajesh M. 🇮🇳
rajesh.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Warangal

"Hyderabad gatherings are Telugu-Urdu-English all in one sentence and nobody signals the switch. I was missing everything. Captio AI follows the whole mix."

Sravya R. 🇮🇳
sravya.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Hyderabad

"Coastal Andhra Telugu at a family Dasara gathering is fast and specific and nothing like Hyderabadi Telugu. Captio AI handles both so I follow my relatives wherever they're from."

Kiran B. 🇮🇳
kiran.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Vijayawada

"Family gatherings with three generations of Telugu speakers — each speaking a different register — used to leave me exhausted. Captio AI on the table means I stay in the conversation the whole time."

Ananya P. 🇮🇳
ananya.p***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Visakhapatnam

"Telangana dialect is very different from standard Telugu and I couldn't lip-read it at all. Captio AI captions the real speech. It's not the textbook version — it's what my family actually says."

Rajesh M. 🇮🇳
rajesh.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Warangal

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Telugu.

Captio AI is free to start

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