Korean live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

South Korea's employment rate for people with disabilities reached 48.4% in 2024, down from 50.3% in 2022 — a declining trend despite policy efforts. South Korea's Employment Promotion and Vocational Rehabilitation Act mandates that private companies with 50 or more employees maintain at least 3.1% disabled workers, with a target of 3.5% by 2029. The Korea Employment Agency for Persons with Disabilities (KEAD) provides employment support services. Despite these structural interventions, deaf and hard of hearing candidates consistently face barriers at the interview stage — the most speech-intensive part of the hiring process — that the quota system does not address.

Korean corporate culture places high value on verbal fluency, formal register, and face-to-face communication in interviews. The chaebol hiring format — multiple rounds including group assessments, one-on-ones, and formal panel interviews — is designed around spoken Korean in the 합쇼체 register. Sign language interpretation at the interview stage is not a standard offering and is rarely provided without a formal advance request. Requesting accommodation can introduce uncertainty into an already high-stakes process.

The phonological structure of Korean amplifies the practical gap. Three-way consonant contrasts now primarily distinguished by pitch are invisible on the lips. Consonant assimilation across syllable boundaries makes connected speech look different from dictionary forms. And end-verb sentence structure means the most important grammatical information arrives last in a long sentence. Captio AI requires no employer arrangement: open the app at the start of the interview, place the phone on the desk, and every Korean sentence — formal 합쇼체 endings and all — appears in real time.