Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Italian 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 Milan, Rome, or Turin office — an interviewer speaking formal Italian at corporate pace. Captio AI captions every question in real time so you read the full sentence before responding.

💻Video interviews

Video interviews on Zoom or Teams — standard in Italian companies for first and second rounds. 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 Italian — fast, formal, often from a Milan-accented recruiter. Captio AI captions the recruiter's voice in real time so compressed audio does not become the barrier.

👥Panel interviews

Panel interviews at large Italian companies or multinationals in Italy. Captio AI follows each panelist in real time even when speakers ask questions from different sides of a boardroom table.

🌍International and foreign-language interviews

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

🎯Assessment centres

Assessment centres and group case exercises — used in Italian management consultancy and banking graduate hiring. Captio AI covers all facilitator speech and group discussion.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Italian
95.5%

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 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.

Italian

Why Italian is hard to understand

Consonant gemination

  • Double consonants change meaning but look identical to single ones
  • Italian geminate consonants — the doubled consonants in 'palla' vs 'pala', 'pappa' vs 'papa' — carry lexical meaning but are distinguished only by duration, not by lip shape. Both the singleton and the geminate produce identical visible mouth positions. In a fast Italian interview, a deaf candidate cannot distinguish geminate from singleton consonants from lip observation alone.

Raddoppiamento sintattico

  • Italian doubles initial consonants across word boundaries — uniquely Italian
  • Italian has a phenomenon called raddoppiamento sintattico — syntactic gemination — where the initial consonant of a word doubles after certain preceding words in the same phrase. 'A casa' is pronounced 'a ccasa'. This makes the phonological form of a word in context different from its dictionary form. A deaf candidate who has learned to recognise words in isolation encounters differently-shaped consonants when those words follow geminata-triggering words in an interview sentence.

Regional accent diversity

  • Sicilian, Neapolitan, Venetian, and Milanese Italian sound different on the lips
  • Standard Italian (based on Florentine/Tuscan) is the prestige interview variety, but Italian interviewers across Rome, Milan, Naples, Venice, and Palermo carry regional phonological influence. Vowel quality, consonant strength, and prosody differ significantly. A deaf candidate recognising Standard Italian lip shapes may face different shapes from an interviewer from Bari or Genoa.

Fast northern Italian delivery

  • Milan and Turin interview speech is fast with reduced vowels
  • Northern Italian — especially Milanese and Torinese speech — is faster than central or southern varieties with more reduced vowels and clipped consonants in natural fast speech. In a Milan finance or tech company interview, the pace of the interview is among the highest for any Italian variety.

Formal register

  • Italian corporate interviews use subjunctive and conditional constructions
  • Formal Italian interview register uses the subjunctive (congiuntivo), conditional (condizionale), and formal pronoun 'Lei' — structures that appear less frequently in everyday Italian conversation and have distinct verb endings. A deaf candidate familiar with casual Italian speech faces additional morphological variation in formal interview vocabulary.

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The Challenge

Italy's demand for workers with disabilities grew 54% in 2022 — but the interview remains a barrier

Italy's Law 68/1999 requires companies with more than 15 employees to employ a percentage of workers with disabilities — 7% for companies over 50 employees. The Italian National Agency for the Deaf (ENS — Ente Nazionale Sordi) represents the deaf community and advocates for workplace inclusion. In 2023, recruitment company HAYS Italia reported that demand for workers with disabilities grew by 54% in 2022, reflecting increasing employer interest in disability inclusion. Despite this growth, only 51.6% of working-age people with disabilities in Italy have paid employment — in line with the European average, but significantly below the general population rate.

The interview stage is not covered by Italy's disability employment law in terms of mandatory accommodation. An employer is not required to provide a sign language interpreter or captioning service at the interview itself. Disclosing a hearing disability before the interview introduces the risk of bias at the shortlisting stage. Italian interviews — whether at a Milanese bank, a Roman law firm, or a Turin manufacturer — are structured, fast, and conducted in spoken Italian without visual aids.

The phonological demands of Italian amplify the access gap. Consonant gemination — where doubled consonants carry meaning but look identical to single ones — creates systematic visual ambiguity. Syntactic gemination changes the shape of words in context. Regional accent variation means an interviewer from Palermo and one from Milan produce different lip shapes for the same vocabulary. Captio AI requires no employer arrangement: open the app at the start of the colloquio, place the phone on the desk, and every Italian question — geminates, syntax, and regional accent included — appears 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

"Milanese Italian is fast. The interviewer spoke at a pace I couldn't keep up with from lip-reading. Captio AI gave me every word in real time. I answered every question clearly and got to the second round."

Giulia M. 🇮🇹
giulia.m***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss, Milan

"The consulting firm case interview was in formal Italian with a lot of subjunctive. Captio AI captured all of it. I followed the complete case and gave answers that matched what was actually asked."

Marco F. 🇮🇹
marco.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Rome

"The panel had interviewers from Milan and Palermo — very different Italian on the lips. Captio AI handled both. I knew exactly who asked what and answered each one directly."

Chiara B. 🇮🇹
chiara.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Naples

"The video interview was fast northern Italian with English technical terms in the middle. Captio AI followed all of it. I finally had an interview where I wasn't spending half my energy trying to hear."

Luca R. 🇮🇹
luca.r***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Turin

"Milanese Italian is fast. The interviewer spoke at a pace I couldn't keep up with from lip-reading. Captio AI gave me every word in real time. I answered every question clearly and got to the second round."

Giulia M. 🇮🇹
giulia.m***@gmail.com
Moderate sensorineural hearing loss, Milan

"The consulting firm case interview was in formal Italian with a lot of subjunctive. Captio AI captured all of it. I followed the complete case and gave answers that matched what was actually asked."

Marco F. 🇮🇹
marco.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Rome

"The panel had interviewers from Milan and Palermo — very different Italian on the lips. Captio AI handled both. I knew exactly who asked what and answered each one directly."

Chiara B. 🇮🇹
chiara.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Naples

"The video interview was fast northern Italian with English technical terms in the middle. Captio AI followed all of it. I finally had an interview where I wasn't spending half my energy trying to hear."

Luca R. 🇮🇹
luca.r***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Turin

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Hear every question in Italian.

Captio AI is free to start

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