Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Ukrainian live captions and productivity tool for group settings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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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 Ukrainian family dinner — Різдво Eve celebrations, a nameday, or a Sunday family meal — with relatives talking over each other across the table.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A birthday party or a gathering of friends where the conversation is fast and everyone has news to share after time apart.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends over varenyky and tea, with rapid conversation about life, family, and current events.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community meeting at a Ukrainian cultural centre, church hall, or diaspora association where announcements are made and the group responds.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a family table — grandparents in regional Ukrainian or surzhyk, parents in standard Ukrainian, grandchildren mixing in English.

🏠Shared living situations

A casual evening at a friend's apartment or a neighbourhood gathering where small groups form and talk freely.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Ukrainian
91.5%

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.

Ukrainian

Why Ukrainian is hard to understand

Three dialect zones

  • Northern, southeastern, and southwestern Ukrainian sound different
  • Ukrainian divides into three major dialect groups — northern (Polissian), southeastern, and southwestern (including western Galician varieties) — with differences in vowel quality, consonant realization, and prosody. A deaf person from Kyiv reading lips of relatives from Lviv or Poltava faces a genuinely different visual landscape.

Semi-soft consonants

  • Three-way palatalization — one level invisible
  • Ukrainian has a three-way consonant distinction: hard, semi-soft (half-palatalized), and soft. The palatalization is carried by tongue position rather than lip shape. All three grades look identical from the outside at a family dinner table, removing a distinction that carries real phonemic weight.

Bilingual switching

  • Ukrainian and Russian shift mid-sentence in many families
  • Many Ukrainian families — particularly in eastern and central regions — historically mixed Ukrainian and Russian in everyday speech (a practice known as surzhyk). Even post-2022, bilingual households code-switch between the two languages at the dinner table, creating an unpredictable mix of two distinct phonological systems.

Colloquial vowel reduction

  • Unstressed vowels collapse in fast family speech
  • Ukrainian colloquial speech reduces unstressed vowels significantly. The careful vowel quality of formal or written speech becomes a compressed sound in fast family conversation. A deaf person who has trained on standard Ukrainian pronunciation encounters reduced forms that shift the visual lip pattern.

Overlapping social speech

  • Ukrainian gatherings are loud and animated
  • Ukrainian family and social gatherings are characterised by lively, overlapping conversation — particularly at celebrations like namedays, Різдво (Christmas), or family reunions. Multiple speakers competing simultaneously means a deaf person cannot choose one face to lip-read without missing what others are saying.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Ukraine: the scale of daily exclusion

Before the onset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, more than 2 million people in Ukraine were living with impaired hearing, and 31,000 were reported to have complete hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization. Ukraine's deaf and hard-of-hearing population faced significant pre-existing gaps in services: hospitals, police stations, and public transport lacked sign language interpretation, leaving deaf individuals without access to vital information in daily life. Access to social and cultural events — family celebrations, community gatherings, religious services — without any live captioning infrastructure meant exclusion was structural, not incidental.

The war that began in February 2022 compounded this exclusion dramatically. Deaf Ukrainians could not hear air raid sirens and struggled to reach bomb shelters in time. Persons with disabilities often lacked access to emergency information in accessible formats — no Braille, no sign language interpretation, no subtitles for urgent broadcasts. The Ukrainian Society of the Deaf, in operation since 1933, worked to provide Ukrainian Sign Language updates throughout the invasion and organised the evacuation of over 6,299 deaf Ukrainians from the most dangerous regions in the first year of the conflict. Many evacuated families — resettled in other Ukrainian cities or abroad — now navigate social and family life in settings without any accessibility infrastructure.

Captio AI captions Ukrainian conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at a Різдво dinner in Kyiv, a diaspora gathering in Warsaw, or a community event in Berlin can follow every story and announcement as it is spoken, without waiting for someone to notice they have been left behind.

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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 family mixes Ukrainian and surzhyk at the dinner table and I always lost track of who was saying what. Captio AI followed both and I finally caught every story."

Oksana K. 🇺🇦
oksana.k***@gmail.com
Kyiv, moderate bilateral loss since adolescence

"My relatives from eastern Ukraine speak very differently from my Lviv family. The app handled both at a family gathering without getting confused — I stayed in the conversation all evening."

Mykhailo H. 🇺🇦
mykhailo.h***@gmail.com
Lviv, severe high-frequency loss

"Ukrainian community events here are loud and everyone is talking at once. Captio AI meant I could follow what was happening at my table instead of guessing from body language."

Dariya S. 🇩🇪
dariya.s***@gmail.com
Berlin (displaced), profound loss

"At nameday celebrations my family talks fast and overlaps constantly. Captio AI kept up — I stopped missing the moments that made everyone laugh."

Vasyl M. 🇵🇱
vasyl.m***@gmail.com
Warsaw, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

"Our family mixes Ukrainian and surzhyk at the dinner table and I always lost track of who was saying what. Captio AI followed both and I finally caught every story."

Oksana K. 🇺🇦
oksana.k***@gmail.com
Kyiv, moderate bilateral loss since adolescence

"My relatives from eastern Ukraine speak very differently from my Lviv family. The app handled both at a family gathering without getting confused — I stayed in the conversation all evening."

Mykhailo H. 🇺🇦
mykhailo.h***@gmail.com
Lviv, severe high-frequency loss

"Ukrainian community events here are loud and everyone is talking at once. Captio AI meant I could follow what was happening at my table instead of guessing from body language."

Dariya S. 🇩🇪
dariya.s***@gmail.com
Berlin (displaced), profound loss

"At nameday celebrations my family talks fast and overlaps constantly. Captio AI kept up — I stopped missing the moments that made everyone laugh."

Vasyl M. 🇵🇱
vasyl.m***@gmail.com
Warsaw, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Ukrainian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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