Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Danish live captions and productivity tool for lectures

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.

🏛️Large lecture halls

Large lecture halls at the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, and the University of Southern Denmark — Danish instruction at full academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and gruppearbejde (group work sessions) where discussion is in Danish, often with English research terminology. Captio AI handles both without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university portals (Brightspace, Absalon) or shared as video files — play on speaker and Captio AI captions whatever is playing in real time.

📚Study groups

Study groups reviewing Danish lecture material. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so you follow each contributor.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Lectures from Jutland faculty whose Danish carries Jysk regional phonological features. Captio AI handles Copenhagen Danish and Jutland varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Online courses and webinars delivered by Danish universities in Danish or English. Captio AI captions any audio source in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Danish
92.3%

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 pace and pressure of a real lecture

Follow without splitting your attention

Lip-reading and note-taking at the same time is an impossible cognitive load. Captio AI handles the following so you can direct all your attention to understanding what is being said.

Captions while the lecturer is still speaking

Words appear on your screen as they are said — not after the sentence ends. You stay in sync with the lecture rather than always being a beat behind.

Works in any lecture setting

Lecture halls, seminar rooms, online classes, study groups. Place the phone on your desk, point it toward the audio source, and Captio AI handles the rest.

A full transcript to study from

Record the lecture and upload it to Audio Transcription after class. Get a complete written record you can search, annotate, and revise from — at your own pace.

60+ languages

For international students, students studying abroad, or courses taught in a second language. Captio AI captions or translates in real time with no manual setup.

No advance notice needed

Official university captioning requires booking in advance and is not available for every session. Captio AI works for any lecture, any time, with no prior arrangement.

Danish

Why Danish is hard to understand

Stød — invisible laryngeal phonation

  • Danish stød distinguishes words by a throat constriction — completely invisible on the lips
  • Danish has a unique suprasegmental feature called stød — a creaky laryngeal phonation that functions phonemically. 'Hund' (dog) versus 'hun' (she) differ by stød. The constriction happens entirely in the larynx, leaving no trace in lip movement. In a Copenhagen or Aarhus lecture, the stød distinctions that carry word meaning throughout the session are absent from the visual signal.

Lenition of plosives

  • Danish plosives between vowels weaken or disappear — Danish is the hardest Scandinavian language to lip-read
  • Danish /d/ between vowels becomes an approximant [ð̞] that barely moves the lips. /g/ between vowels weakens to near-zero. /v/ reduces. 'Fugleunge' (chick) has multiple near-silent consonants. Danish is widely described as 'mumbled' even by hearing Scandinavians — and for a deaf student, the whole-syllable swallowing of Danish lenition makes lecture-speed Danish the hardest Scandinavian variety to lip-read.

Jysk-Rigsdansk divergence

  • Jutland Danish and Copenhagen Danish move the mouth differently
  • Jysk (Jutland) dialects differ dramatically from Copenhagen Rigsdansk in prosody, vowel quality, and stød treatment. The University of Aarhus sits in Jutland; the University of Copenhagen sits in the capital. A deaf student calibrated to one regional standard finds the other's lecture delivery consistently difficult to track.

No spoken standard

  • Danish has no enforced spoken standard — every lecturer uses their regional variety
  • Unlike many other languages, Danish has no prescribed spoken standard. University lecturers throughout Denmark speak their native regional variety in formal settings. This means a deaf student encounters a different phonological target with every new lecturer, making calibration to a single standard impossible.

Vowel inventory complexity

  • Danish has many front vowels that look nearly identical at lecture speed
  • Danish has a large front-vowel inventory where subtle differences in lip rounding and tongue height distinguish word meanings. At lecture speed, these distinctions compress. The near-homophonous front vowels of fast Danish academic speech produce overlapping lip shapes that a deaf student cannot reliably distinguish.

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The Challenge

530,000 Danes with hearing loss — and a 40% employment rate for deaf and hard of hearing adults

A EuroTrak survey found that 11.9% of the adult Danish population — around 530,000 people — reports suffering from hearing loss. Of those, only 47.8% use hearing aids, meaning roughly 275,000 hearing-impaired Danes go without assistive devices. The age group most affected is those over 74, but hearing loss affects Danes across the age spectrum. A 2019 employment study found that while the general Danish employment rate is 77%, the employment rate among deaf and hard of hearing adults is around 40% — a gap consistent with educational access barriers that begin in lecture halls.

Denmark's disability framework is among the more generous in Europe. Under the Act for Compensation of Disabled Employees, deaf Danes are granted up to 20 hours per week of interpretation services for workplace use. The Consolidated Health Act guarantees hard of hearing people access to free interpretation for health appointments. Danish Sign Language (DSL) is well-supported institutionally. However, the 20-hour weekly allocation is tied to employment — not education. University students must arrange accommodation through their institution, and the pool of specialised academic interpreters for STEM and professional fields is limited.

For a deaf student at the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, or DTU, the challenge is not lack of legal protection but lack of provision. Danish is objectively among the hardest languages to lip-read — the lenition of plosives, the near-silent syllables, and the stød make it harder than Swedish or Norwegian even in careful speech. At full academic lecture pace, Danish becomes inaccessible without real-time captioning. Captio AI captions Danish lectures in real time — in Copenhagen or Jutland — handling every lecturer's regional variety without manual reconfiguration.

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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

"Danish stød is a throat sound — nothing on the lips. And the consonants between vowels almost disappear. Captio AI captures the acoustics. Copenhagen lectures are accessible now."

Sofie M. 🇩🇰
sofie.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Copenhagen

"My professor is from Jutland. Jysk sounds nothing like Copenhagen Danish I grew up with. Captio AI handles both varieties. I follow Aarhus lectures without recalibrating for each lecturer."

Mikkel H. 🇩🇰
mikkel.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Aarhus University

"Technical Danish lectures at DTU are dense and fast. The plosives disappear between vowels. Captio AI transcribes what is actually said. Engineering is accessible now."

Astrid B. 🇩🇰
astrid.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, DTU, Lyngby

"Southern Danish has its own vowel patterns. Captio AI handles every regional variety without me changing any settings. Odense seminars are captions I can trust."

Lars N. 🇩🇰
lars.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Southern Denmark, Odense

"Danish stød is a throat sound — nothing on the lips. And the consonants between vowels almost disappear. Captio AI captures the acoustics. Copenhagen lectures are accessible now."

Sofie M. 🇩🇰
sofie.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Copenhagen

"My professor is from Jutland. Jysk sounds nothing like Copenhagen Danish I grew up with. Captio AI handles both varieties. I follow Aarhus lectures without recalibrating for each lecturer."

Mikkel H. 🇩🇰
mikkel.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Aarhus University

"Technical Danish lectures at DTU are dense and fast. The plosives disappear between vowels. Captio AI transcribes what is actually said. Engineering is accessible now."

Astrid B. 🇩🇰
astrid.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, DTU, Lyngby

"Southern Danish has its own vowel patterns. Captio AI handles every regional variety without me changing any settings. Odense seminars are captions I can trust."

Lars N. 🇩🇰
lars.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Southern Denmark, Odense

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Danish.

Captio AI is free to start

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