Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

French live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

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.

👔In-person interviews

In a Paris, Lyon, or Brussels office — an interviewer speaking formal French at corporate pace with liaison and elision in every sentence. Captio AI captions every question in real time.

💻Video interviews

Video interviews on Zoom or Teams — standard for first rounds at French and Belgian companies. Put the call on speaker and follow every question in real time whatever the regional accent.

📞Phone screens and initial calls

The HR screening call in French — fast formal speech with heavy liaison and schwa deletion. Captio AI captions the recruiter's voice in real time so phone audio compression does not cost you the interview.

👥Panel interviews

Structured panel interviews at French corporations, grande entreprises, or public sector employers. Captio AI follows each panelist in real time even when speakers ask questions in rapid succession.

🌍International and foreign-language interviews

For roles at international firms where the interview shifts between French and English. Live Translator handles both in the same session without manual switching.

🎯Assessment centres

Assessment centres and case study presentations — used in French management consultancy and grandes écoles graduate hiring. Captio AI covers all facilitator speech and group discussion.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

French
94.3%

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.

French

Why French is hard to understand

Liaison

  • Word-final silent consonants come alive before vowels — unpredictably
  • In formal French interview speech, liaison is obligatory: consonants that are silent in isolation become pronounced when the next word begins with a vowel — 'vous_avez', 'les_employeurs', 'un_entretien'. The same word looks different on the lips depending on what follows it. A deaf candidate tracking word shapes in a formal interview must deal with phonological forms that differ from the citation forms they recognise.

Schwa deletion

  • Syllables disappear from French words in fast speech
  • The schwa /ə/ — present in written French — is regularly deleted in fast spoken French. 'Je ne sais pas' becomes 'j'sais pas'. 'Samedi' becomes 'samdi'. In a fast Parisian interview, syllables that appear in writing vanish from the audio and from the lip sequence. A lip-reader tracking the spoken form finds fewer syllables than the written word contains.

Regional variety gap

  • Parisian, Québécois, Belgian, and African French look different on the lips
  • French is spoken across France, Québec, Belgium, Switzerland, and Francophone Africa with distinct phonological profiles. Québécois French has different vowel qualities and additional vowel contrasts. Belgian French has different rhythm. West African French carries tonal influence. In a Paris office, a deaf candidate may be watching an interviewer from Lyon, Toulouse, or Dakar — each with different lip shapes for the same words.

Elision and grammatical contraction

  • Grammatical words collapse before vowels in formal French
  • French systematically elides short grammatical words before vowels — 'le' becomes 'l'', 'de' becomes 'd'', 'je' becomes 'j''. These contractions occur at the highest rate in formal speech. In a fast interview question, the grammatical skeleton of the sentence — articles, pronouns, prepositions — collapses visually into abbreviated forms.

Lip-reading baseline difficulty

  • Research shows French lip-reading gives access to only 10–30% of speech
  • French cued speech research and lip-reading studies have consistently found that without additional visual or auditory cues, lip-reading French gives access to only 10 to 30% of a word or sentence. The ambiguity of French lip shapes — many consonant pairs look identical — means that even a highly skilled deaf lip-reader is reconstructing the majority of an interview question from context, not from what they can directly see.

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The Challenge

10 million people with hearing difficulties in France — and a workplace quota that does not reach the interview room

France's 2008 Handicap-Santé survey counted 10 million people with hearing difficulties — 16% of the national population. In 2021, 2.9 million people in France were recognized as having a disability that limited their daily activities, representing 11% of the workforce. French disability law (Law of 2005) requires companies with 20 or more employees to maintain a 6% quota of disabled workers and pay a contribution to AGEFIPH if they fall short. Despite this, only 51.6% of working-age people with disabilities in France are in paid employment — below the general population rate.

The interview stage is where the structural barrier is most acute. French employment law does not require employers to provide captioning or sign language interpretation at the interview itself. The AGEFIPH fund finances workplace accommodations but its provisions are focused on employed workers rather than the hiring process. A deaf candidate attending a French job interview — whether at a CAC 40 company in La Défense or a public service employer in Lyon — has no right to captioning support at the interview stage and must request it informally, with the bias risk that entails.

French lip-reading research consistently shows that access to 10–30% of speech is the upper bound without additional support. In a formal interview with liaison, schwa deletion, and regional phonological variation, a deaf candidate is reconstructing the majority of each question from partial visual information and context. Captio AI eliminates the guesswork: open the app at the start of the entretien, place the phone on the desk, and every French question — liaison, elision, and all — is available in real time.

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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

"French liaison and elision in a formal interview made every sentence unpredictable. Captio AI gave me the complete spoken form in real time. I answered every question with confidence for the first time."

Camille D. 🇫🇷
camille.d***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss, Paris

"The consulting firm case study interview was fast Parisian French with heavy schwa deletion. Captio AI captured everything. I followed the case presentation and the panel Q&A without missing a word."

Thomas M. 🇫🇷
thomas.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Lyon

"Belgian French sounds different from Parisian French on the lips. I had always struggled with Parisian interviewers. Captio AI handled both without any adjustment. I made it to the final round."

Sophie L. 🇧🇪
sophie.l***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Brussels

"Québécois French in a formal interview is very fast with vowel qualities I wasn't expecting. Captio AI followed every sentence. I answered every question in full and got the role."

Alexandre B. 🇨🇦
alexandre.b***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Montréal

"French liaison and elision in a formal interview made every sentence unpredictable. Captio AI gave me the complete spoken form in real time. I answered every question with confidence for the first time."

Camille D. 🇫🇷
camille.d***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss, Paris

"The consulting firm case study interview was fast Parisian French with heavy schwa deletion. Captio AI captured everything. I followed the case presentation and the panel Q&A without missing a word."

Thomas M. 🇫🇷
thomas.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Lyon

"Belgian French sounds different from Parisian French on the lips. I had always struggled with Parisian interviewers. Captio AI handled both without any adjustment. I made it to the final round."

Sophie L. 🇧🇪
sophie.l***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Brussels

"Québécois French in a formal interview is very fast with vowel qualities I wasn't expecting. Captio AI followed every sentence. I answered every question in full and got the role."

Alexandre B. 🇨🇦
alexandre.b***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Montréal

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Hear every question in French.

Captio AI is free to start

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