Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Urdu 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

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

An Eid gathering where relatives from across Pakistan — Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar — come together, each speaking a mix of Urdu, Punjabi, and local language. Captio AI captions each voice so you follow the celebration, not just the parts in standard Urdu.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A shaadi (wedding) reception where dozens of family members move between groups, speak at once, and mix languages without any accommodation for anyone. Captio AI gives you real-time captions of whoever is speaking near your phone.

Friend catch-ups

A family dinner at home in Lahore or Birmingham where children switch freely between Urdu and English and grandparents speak Punjabi. Captio AI follows the full multilingual exchange.

🌍Multilingual groups

A neighbourhood gathering or community event where local Urdu-speaking residents meet and multiple people contribute quickly. Captio AI captions each speaker.

👥Community and club meetings

A community event at a mosque or Islamic centre where formal Urdu is used in the address and colloquial Urdu fills the social hour after. Captio AI follows both registers.

🏠Shared living situations

A social gathering of friends — chai, samosas, and fast Urdu-English conversation — where nobody thinks to slow down or repeat. Captio AI captions every exchange in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Urdu
93.7%

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.

Urdu

Why Urdu is hard to understand

Urdu-Punjabi code-switching

  • Pakistani family gatherings move between Urdu and Punjabi without announcement
  • In Pakistan, where Punjabi is the mother tongue of the majority of the population, social conversations routinely mix Urdu and Punjabi. At a family gathering in Lahore, grandparents may speak Punjabi, parents Urdu influenced by Punjabi phonology, and younger members switch between both. These are distinct phonological systems — different vowel inventories, consonant patterns, and prosody — and a deaf person following Urdu encounters a completely different mouth pattern the moment Punjabi appears.

Nasalized vowels

  • Urdu's nasal vowel contrast changes meaning but is invisible on the lips
  • Urdu has a nasal vowel contrast that distinguishes words and grammatical forms throughout the lexicon. This distinction is entirely auditory — nasalized and oral vowels produce identical lip and jaw movements. In fast group conversation, nasalization is further reduced. A deaf person cannot distinguish nasalized from oral vowels from lip movement alone, losing access to distinctions that change the meaning of common words.

Aspirated stop pairs

  • Urdu's aspirated consonants change meaning but are not visible on the lips
  • Like Hindi, Urdu has aspirated consonant pairs (p/ph, b/bh, k/kh, g/gh, etc.) that change word meaning throughout the lexicon. Aspiration is an auditory phenomenon — air released after a consonant — invisible in lip movement. In fast informal speech, aspiration reduces further. A deaf person cannot distinguish پ from پھ from lip movement — a distinction that appears throughout everyday Urdu vocabulary.

Register gulf

  • Literary Urdu and colloquial Urdu are phonologically distant in the same family gathering
  • Literary Urdu uses a formal Perso-Arabic register with Nastaliq-style vocabulary that sounds substantially different from the fast colloquial Urdu spoken at a family gathering. The same person may switch between registers depending on the topic — slipping into colloquial for conversation and a semi-formal register for a story or joke with an older relative. A deaf person calibrated to one register finds the other phonologically unfamiliar.

Urdu-English-Punjabi trilingualism

  • Educated urban Pakistani gatherings move between three languages in the same conversation
  • Educated urban Pakistanis and UK diaspora frequently move between Urdu, English, and Punjabi in a single conversation: 'Yaar, main kal meeting ke baad coffee karein? It's been ages.' Each switch changes the phonological system entirely without announcement, and the English and Punjabi segments typically carry the most specific content. A deaf person cannot track three phonological systems simultaneously from visual information.

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The Challenge

14.5 million in Pakistan. Fewer than 5% of deaf children attend school.

An estimated 14.5 million Pakistanis live with hearing loss, with approximately 10 million identified as deaf. A WHO Eastern Mediterranean report (2023) on hearing impairment in Pakistan found that hearing loss is severe and congenital in 70% of cases, with profound bilateral deafness affecting 1.6 per 1,000 individuals — among the highest rates in the region. A significant contributor is the cultural prevalence of consanguineous marriage (estimated at 60% of Pakistani marriages), which is the primary driver of autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss — the most common genetic cause of deafness in Pakistan.

Educational access for deaf children in Pakistan is severely limited. A Borgen Project report found that less than 5% of deaf children in Pakistan attend school, with rates even lower for girls. This educational exclusion compounds into adult social exclusion: deaf Pakistanis without literacy or formal education face barriers to participation in employment, community life, and even family gatherings where communication is assumed to be effortless. Pakistan Sign Language exists but interpreter provision is minimal, and no formal support exists for communication access in informal social settings.

Captio AI captions Urdu in real time — including Punjabi-inflected speech, code-switching to English, and the fast colloquial register of Pakistani family life — so the Eid gathering, the family dinner in Lahore or Birmingham, and the shaadi reception are conversations a deaf person can follow without watching faces and guessing.

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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

"Lahori family gatherings switch between Punjabi and Urdu in the same sentence. I used to lose the thread immediately. Captio AI follows both and I stay in the conversation."

Sana M. 🇵🇰
sana.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lahore

"Karachi gatherings are Urdu-English-Sindhi depending on who you're talking to. Captio AI captions Urdu and English so the fastest conversations aren't a problem anymore."

Imran A. 🇵🇰
imran.a***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Karachi

"UK Pakistani family gatherings are Urdu, Punjabi, English, all mixed. I was missing everything. Captio AI on the table changed that. Eid is actually fun now."

Aisha T. 🇬🇧
aisha.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Birmingham

"Islamabad social circles are full Urdu-English mixing and everyone speaks fast. Captio AI gives me the full caption of every sentence. I stop nodding at things I didn't hear."

Tariq R. 🇵🇰
tariq.r***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Islamabad

"Lahori family gatherings switch between Punjabi and Urdu in the same sentence. I used to lose the thread immediately. Captio AI follows both and I stay in the conversation."

Sana M. 🇵🇰
sana.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lahore

"Karachi gatherings are Urdu-English-Sindhi depending on who you're talking to. Captio AI captions Urdu and English so the fastest conversations aren't a problem anymore."

Imran A. 🇵🇰
imran.a***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Karachi

"UK Pakistani family gatherings are Urdu, Punjabi, English, all mixed. I was missing everything. Captio AI on the table changed that. Eid is actually fun now."

Aisha T. 🇬🇧
aisha.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Birmingham

"Islamabad social circles are full Urdu-English mixing and everyone speaks fast. Captio AI gives me the full caption of every sentence. I stop nodding at things I didn't hear."

Tariq R. 🇵🇰
tariq.r***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Islamabad

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Urdu.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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