Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Basque live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

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.

👔In-person interviews

Job interviews in the Basque Autonomous Community may be conducted in Basque, Spanish, or both depending on the employer's language policy. Captio AI handles both in real time so you are prepared for whichever the interviewer opens with.

💻Video interviews

Video interviews over Teams or Zoom are standard at Basque companies and multinationals in Bilbao and San Sebastián. Captio AI captions the call audio in real time whatever language is used.

📞Phone screens and initial calls

Phone screens at Basque public sector and language-sensitive employers are often conducted in Basque. Captio AI captions the speech live without a video feed.

👥Panel interviews

Panel interviews in the Basque Country may include speakers with different dialectal backgrounds — a Biscayan speaker and a Gipuzkoan speaker sound noticeably different. Captio AI handles all varieties in the same room.

🌍International and foreign-language interviews

International companies operating in Bilbao or San Sebastián often conduct rounds in English before switching to Spanish or Basque. Captio AI covers all three languages in the same session.

🎯Assessment centres

Group assessment exercises at Basque employers involve collaborative tasks in Basque or Spanish. Captio AI helps you follow every speaker and every instruction across the group.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Basque
89.3%

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 for the room where a missed word has real consequences

Read the full question before you answer

Every word appears on screen as the interviewer speaks. You read the question completely before responding — nothing guessed, nothing reconstructed.

Works in person and on any call format

In-person interviews, video calls, phone screens. Place the phone on the table or point it toward the audio — Captio AI handles every format.

Discreet by design

The app runs quietly on your phone. Place it on the table or hold it naturally. No explanation needed, no drawing attention to the accommodation.

No asking for repeats

Asking an interviewer to repeat a question signals uncertainty. Captio AI means you never need to — you read it in real time and answer with confidence.

Any language

For international roles, multilingual panels, or interviews conducted in a second language. Live Translator captions and translates in real time so language is never the barrier.

Private by default

Interview conversations are sensitive. Captio AI processes audio in real time and discards it immediately — nothing is stored, nothing is shared.

Basque

Why Basque is hard to understand

Apical vs laminal sibilants

  • Two s-sounds, one visible shape
  • Basque distinguishes apical sibilants (produced with the tip of the tongue) from laminal sibilants (produced with the blade). Both produce visually similar hissing shapes at the lips but sound markedly different. This distinction — unique among European languages at this level of systematic contrast — is acoustically significant but visually invisible.

Biscayan–Souletin dialect range

  • Dialects as different as two separate languages
  • The phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical differences between geographically distant Basque dialects — particularly Biscayan in the west and Souletin in the far east — are as abundant as those between Catalan and Spanish. A deaf reader calibrated on Biscayan Basque used in Bilbao faces a fundamentally different system in a Souletin interview.

Souletin nasal vowels

  • A phoneme absent from other Basque varieties
  • In the Souletin dialect of French Basque Country, nasal vowels and aspirated consonants appear that are absent from other Basque varieties and from Spanish entirely. These phonemes are produced inside the vocal tract with no visible lip marker, making them undetectable through lip-reading.

Basque–Spanish switching

  • Two unrelated languages in one interview
  • In the Basque Autonomous Community, professional settings routinely switch between Basque and Spanish — two languages with no shared phonological ancestry whatsoever. Both language streams must be tracked in the same interview, with no shared phonological patterns to bridge them.

Palatal harmony effects

  • Consonant series that shift after /i/
  • Many Basque dialects exhibit derived palatalization: coronal consonants change to their palatal counterparts after the high front vowel /i/. This means the same consonant produces a different shape depending on what vowel precedes it — adding a context-dependent variation layer invisible in lip-reading.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and employment in the Basque Country and Spain

Spain's National Statistics Institute reports 1,064,000 people who are deaf or have a hearing disability — 2.3% of the national population. A 2023 study published in PMC examining the perception of COVID-19's impact on Spaniards with hearing disabilities found that the pandemic amplified longstanding employment vulnerabilities: job losses hit deaf and hard of hearing workers disproportionately, and recovery into formal employment was slower, reflecting the structural communication barriers they face in recruitment that pre-date any specific crisis.

In the Basque Autonomous Community — one of Spain's wealthiest and most bilingual regions — the language policies that protect Basque in public life also mean that job interviews may be conducted in Basque, Spanish, or both. For a deaf candidate, this bilingual environment compounds the standard challenge: they must follow a language that may differ from their dominant one, in a register and at a pace determined entirely by the interviewer.

The WHO World Report on Hearing (2021) estimated the global annual cost of unaddressed hearing loss at over USD 980 billion, concentrated among working-age adults. In France's Basque Country — where a 2022 CONSTANCES cohort study found that 25% of French adults have some degree of hearing loss — the employment implications for deaf and hard of hearing candidates are equally significant. Captio AI gives deaf and hard of hearing job seekers in Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Bayonne a way to follow every word of an interview in Basque, Spanish, or English — in real time, without an interpreter.

Download for free

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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

"The interview switched between Basque and Spanish throughout. Captio AI tracked both automatically. I never lost track of which language was being used or what was being asked."

Ane G. 🇪🇸
ane.g***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since birth, Bilbao

"Basque sibilant distinctions — apical versus laminal — were completely invisible to me. Captio AI captures them from the audio. Every question in the San Sebastián interview came through correctly."

Mikel I. 🇪🇸
mikel.i***@gmail.com
Sensorineural hearing loss, San Sebastián

"The Vitoria panel included one interviewer using Gipuzkoan Basque and another who switched to Spanish for everything technical. Captio AI followed both without any adjustment."

Leire A. 🇪🇸
leire.a***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Vitoria-Gasteiz

"French Basque Country interviews can involve Souletin features I was not prepared for. Captio AI handled them alongside French in the same session. First time a Basque-country interview felt genuinely accessible."

Xabier E. 🇫🇷
xabier.e***@gmail.com
Deaf since age 9, Bayonne

"The interview switched between Basque and Spanish throughout. Captio AI tracked both automatically. I never lost track of which language was being used or what was being asked."

Ane G. 🇪🇸
ane.g***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since birth, Bilbao

"Basque sibilant distinctions — apical versus laminal — were completely invisible to me. Captio AI captures them from the audio. Every question in the San Sebastián interview came through correctly."

Mikel I. 🇪🇸
mikel.i***@gmail.com
Sensorineural hearing loss, San Sebastián

"The Vitoria panel included one interviewer using Gipuzkoan Basque and another who switched to Spanish for everything technical. Captio AI followed both without any adjustment."

Leire A. 🇪🇸
leire.a***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Vitoria-Gasteiz

"French Basque Country interviews can involve Souletin features I was not prepared for. Captio AI handled them alongside French in the same session. First time a Basque-country interview felt genuinely accessible."

Xabier E. 🇫🇷
xabier.e***@gmail.com
Deaf since age 9, Bayonne

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Hear every question in Basque.

Captio AI is free to start

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