Kannada live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

India has 63 million people with significant hearing loss. Karnataka — home to Bengaluru, India's largest IT hub — is one of India's major employment centres, with large IT companies, manufacturing, aerospace, and government sectors. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act 2016 mandates a 4% employment quota in government jobs and requires reasonable accommodations for disabled workers. The Deaf Enabled Foundation operates across Karnataka and other South Indian states, providing vocational training and job placements for deaf candidates. Despite this support infrastructure, the interview process at most Bengaluru IT companies, manufacturing firms, and public sector employers does not include captioning as a standard offering.

The UNDP India disability inclusion study (2023) found that while some major IT companies — particularly those with international diversity and inclusion programmes — had made progress, the majority of private-sector employers in India lacked awareness of accommodation obligations and rarely provided interview-stage support for deaf candidates. Bengaluru's tech interviews — technical rounds, HR discussions, and group exercises conducted in Kannada, Hindi, and English — remain primarily oral and designed without deaf access in mind.

Kannada's linguistic structure amplifies the access gap. MRI research has confirmed that the dental-retroflex contrast — one of Kannada's distinctive phonological features — is produced entirely inside the mouth and is invisible on the lips. Formal Grandhika vocabulary in official interviews differs from everyday speech. Bengaluru's trilingual switching makes the interview a three-language tracking challenge. Captio AI requires no employer arrangement: open the app, place the phone on the desk, and every Kannada, English, or Hindi sentence is available in real time.