Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Welsh 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

Welsh family Sunday lunches, chapel anniversary teas, and birthday gatherings bring multiple generations together around a table of food and fast conversation. Captio AI keeps the full exchange visible for deaf and hard-of-hearing family members.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

House parties and community get-togethers in Caernarfon, Aberystwyth, or a Valleys town move between Welsh and English fluidly. Captio AI follows both languages in real time so deaf guests can stay part of every conversation.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with friends in a Welsh-speaking café or local pub mixes dialects, code-switches, and fast banter. Captio AI captions every word so a deaf person can contribute rather than guess at the conversation.

🌍Multilingual groups

Eisteddfod committee meetings, community council sessions, and neighbourhood association events use conversational Welsh at speed. Captio AI makes the full discussion followable without a professional interpreter.

👥Community and club meetings

When grandparents speak North Welsh and grandchildren are from the South, or when the table mixes Welsh-dominant and English-dominant speakers, the phonological range widens. Captio AI captions the full range and keeps the gathering connected.

🏠Shared living situations

Gatherings at a rugby club, a choir rehearsal, or a menter iaith community event involve rapid exchanges between familiar members. Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard-of-hearing member part of every moment.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Welsh
85.7%

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.

Welsh

Why Welsh is hard to understand

Consonant mutations

  • The same word opens with a different lip shape every time
  • Welsh has three types of initial consonant mutations — soft, nasal, and aspirate — that change the opening sound of a word depending on grammatical context. 'Pen' (head) becomes 'ben', 'mhen', or 'phen' in different constructions. For a deaf lip-reader, the same word begins with a completely different lip movement every time it appears in a sentence.

Unique phonemes

  • Back-of-throat sounds produce almost no lip movement
  • Welsh contains phonemes absent from English: the lateral fricative /ɬ/ (written 'll'), the velar fricative /χ/ (written 'ch'), and the voiceless rhotic /rh/. These sounds are produced far back in the mouth or with directed airflow that creates almost no visible lip or jaw movement — they are among the hardest phonemes to identify by sight in any European language.

North vs. South Welsh

  • Vowels and vocabulary shift by region
  • Northern and Southern Welsh dialects diverge significantly in vowel quality, some consonants, and vocabulary. 'Rŵan' in the North is 'nawr' in the South; vowel pronunciations differ enough that a deaf lip-reader trained on one regional variety will struggle to track a speaker from the other at a mixed family gathering.

Welsh-English code-switching

  • The phonological system changes mid-sentence
  • In most Welsh-speaking communities, Welsh and English are in constant contact and mid-sentence switches are frequent and unmarked. A speaker may begin a sentence in Welsh and end it in English with no prosodic signal. For a deaf person, this means the phonological system they are tracking can change without warning.

Rapid connected speech

  • Mutations, reductions, and blurred boundaries compound at speed
  • Fast conversational Welsh reduces consonant clusters, merges word boundaries, and compresses vowel contrasts. The mutations, the back-of-mouth phonemes, and the reduced vowel space all intensify at conversational speed, leaving fewer reliable visual anchors than slow or careful Welsh would provide.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Wales: the scale of daily exclusion

Over 900,000 people in Wales — roughly 29% of the Welsh population — are deaf, British Sign Language users, have hearing loss, or experience tinnitus, according to RNID figures. The Welsh Government estimates between 5,600 and 7,300 Welsh residents use BSL as their first or preferred language. A 2024 qualitative study published in the Journal of Public Health (PMC11358617) documented that deaf people in Wales routinely face barriers to basic services: GP surgeries and hospitals that telephone patients despite knowing they are deaf, with inconsistent interpretation provision and poor communication leading to misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis.

Research published by the Institute of Welsh Affairs and evidence submitted to the Senedd during the BSL (Wales) Bill consultation found that fewer BSL interpreters are available per capita in Wales than in England, and that deaf people in Wales are twice as likely to experience mental health problems as the general population. Over 71% of BSL users surveyed believe most hearing people hold negative attitudes toward the deaf community. The BSL (Wales) Bill seeks to address some of these gaps — but legislation does not immediately produce interpreters for spontaneous social settings like family gatherings and community events.

Captio AI captions Welsh and English conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a family gathering in Caernarfon or a community event in Cardiff without waiting for a scarce interpreter.

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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

"Sunday lunch with my Welsh-speaking family used to be the hardest conversation of my week. Everyone talks fast, switching between Welsh and English mid-sentence. Captio AI follows every switch and I finally feel part of it."

Siân R. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
sian.r***@gmail.com
Caernarfon, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"The mutations in Welsh mean the same word starts differently every time. I could never lip-read it reliably. Captio AI gives me the transcript and the mutations stop being a barrier."

Rhys T. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
rhys.t***@gmail.com
Cardiff, deaf since age 9

"At choir reunions everyone speaks fast Ceredigion Welsh with the local accent. I used to catch every third sentence. Now I read the whole conversation in real time."

Bethan M. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
bethan.m***@gmail.com
Aberystwyth, sensorineural hearing loss

"My grandchildren speak South Welsh and my parents speak North Welsh. A family gathering used to mean two dialects I could barely track at once. Captio AI handles both without missing a beat."

Dafydd O. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
dafydd.o***@gmail.com
Pontypridd, age-related hearing loss

"Sunday lunch with my Welsh-speaking family used to be the hardest conversation of my week. Everyone talks fast, switching between Welsh and English mid-sentence. Captio AI follows every switch and I finally feel part of it."

Siân R. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
sian.r***@gmail.com
Caernarfon, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"The mutations in Welsh mean the same word starts differently every time. I could never lip-read it reliably. Captio AI gives me the transcript and the mutations stop being a barrier."

Rhys T. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
rhys.t***@gmail.com
Cardiff, deaf since age 9

"At choir reunions everyone speaks fast Ceredigion Welsh with the local accent. I used to catch every third sentence. Now I read the whole conversation in real time."

Bethan M. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
bethan.m***@gmail.com
Aberystwyth, sensorineural hearing loss

"My grandchildren speak South Welsh and my parents speak North Welsh. A family gathering used to mean two dialects I could barely track at once. Captio AI handles both without missing a beat."

Dafydd O. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
dafydd.o***@gmail.com
Pontypridd, age-related hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Welsh.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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