Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Marathi 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

Pune University, Mumbai University, Nagpur University, SPPU lecture halls. Marathi-medium lectures at academic pace, often Pune-accented formal Marathi. Place the phone on the desk facing the speaker. Captio AI captions from any row.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

University seminars mixing Marathi, Hindi, and English in discussion. Students from Konkan, Vidarbha, and Marathwada contributing with different regional varieties. Captio AI follows whoever is speaking.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university portals or WhatsApp shared recordings. Put the recording on speaker and point Captio AI at the audio for accurate captions in real time.

📚Study groups

Study groups in Pune or Nagpur — fast conversational Marathi mixed with Hindi and English. Captio AI follows whoever is explaining and handles all three languages without switching.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Marathi students in English-medium programmes, or international students following Marathi-medium courses. Live Translator captions in real time so language is not the access barrier.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Visiting academics and guest speakers from different regions of Maharashtra. Captio AI handles Pune, Nagpuri, Vidarbhi, and coastal Marathi — any speaker at any venue.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Marathi
93.1%

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.

Marathi

Why Marathi is hard to understand

4-way aspiration grid

  • Marathi's four-way stop contrast — voiceless/voiced × unaspirated/aspirated — is entirely invisible on the lips
  • Marathi distinguishes four categories of stop consonant: voiceless unaspirated (p, t, k), voiceless aspirated (pʰ, tʰ, kʰ), voiced unaspirated (b, d, g), and voiced aspirated or breathy (bʱ, dʱ, gʱ). All four produce identical lip shapes. In a lecture, these contrasts carry meaning throughout — a deaf student sees the same lip movement for sounds that a hearing student distinguishes with ease. Research on Marathi phonology confirms this 38-consonant inventory as one of the most distinctive in South Asia.

Retroflex system

  • Retroflex vs. dental consonant pairs look identical on the lips but signal different words entirely
  • Marathi distinguishes retroflex stops (ट, ठ, ड, ढ, ण) from their dental counterparts (त, थ, द, ध, न). The retroflex is produced with the tongue curled back — a movement entirely inside the mouth, producing no visible lip distinction from the dental version. In a Marathi lecture, every sentence contains words where retroflex-dental contrast carries meaning, and none of those contrasts are visible.

Dialectal variation

  • Pune Marathi, Nagpuri, Vidarbhi, and coastal Malvani produce different phonological profiles — all present in Maharashtra's universities
  • Pune Marathi is the prestige academic variety, but Maharashtra's universities draw students and faculty from Nagpur (Vidarbhi dialect), Konkan coast (Konkani-influenced), and the Malvani coast. Each variety has distinct vowel quality, consonant realization, and prosodic patterns. A deaf student calibrated to Pune Marathi encounters different lip profiles when the lecturer grew up speaking Vidarbhi or coastal Marathi.

Sanskrit academic register

  • Marathi academic lectures use Sanskrit-heavy formal vocabulary that differs completely from colloquial speech
  • Academic Marathi leans on Sanskrit-derived terminology in formal discourse: अभ्यासक्रम (curriculum), विद्यापीठ (university), संशोधन (research). These Sanskritic words have different phonological structures from everyday Marathi vocabulary and produce different lip patterns. A deaf student who lip-reads colloquial Marathi encounters unfamiliar mouth shapes when the professor shifts to academic register.

Marathi-Hindi-English mixing

  • Pune and Mumbai university lectures mix Marathi, Hindi, and English — shifting phonological systems mid-sentence
  • University lectures in Pune and Mumbai routinely blend Marathi with Hindi or English, particularly for technical vocabulary. Each code-switch changes the phonological system, stress pattern, and lip profile. A deaf student must track three distinct systems simultaneously, with the switch occurring precisely when the conceptual content is most important.

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The Challenge

63 million in India with hearing loss — Maharashtra's universities have no systematic captioning infrastructure

India has approximately 63 million people with significant auditory loss, and Maharashtra — with a population of 120 million — carries a proportionate share. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) documented disability prevalence across Indian states, with Maharashtra at approximately 1.6% of the population reporting disability. India's formal deaf education infrastructure is concentrated in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Delhi — yet even in Maharashtra, which has the highest number of specialist deaf schools after Tamil Nadu, the gap between school-level provision and university-level accessibility is stark. Most deaf and hard of hearing students who complete secondary education do so without any real-time captioning provision.

Indian Sign Language (ISL) remains without official national recognition, despite the RPDA 2016 (Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act) creating a framework for linguistic rights. A 2025 study in Language Policy (Springer) documented that ISL speakers remain outside the formal protections of the Language Rights framework in India — meaning that sign language interpreting is not a mandated service in Indian universities the way it is in, for example, the UK or Germany. In Maharashtra specifically, Marathi Sign Language exists as a community variety but interpreter provision at universities remains ad hoc and individually negotiated.

Maharashtra has several hundred deaf and hard of hearing schools but the chain breaks sharply at the university level. The Helen Keller Institute for Deaf and Deafblind (Mumbai) and similar organizations note that a person's educational access often ends at grade school level. For those who do reach university, the lecture hall is the daily manifestation of that gap: Marathi academic speech delivered at pace, with no institutional captioning, in a phonological system that already places exceptional demands on lip-reading.

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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

"SPPU lectures in formal Pune Marathi use Sanskrit vocabulary I don't lip-read well. Captio AI captures the academic register accurately. I follow lectures instead of guessing them."

Priya D. 🇮🇳
priya.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Pune

"Nagpuri Marathi in lectures sounds different from Pune Marathi on the lips. Captio AI handles both. Nagpur University lectures are accessible to me for the first time."

Rahul B. 🇮🇳
rahul.b***@gmail.com
Deaf student, Nagpur

"Mumbai University lectures mix Marathi, Hindi, and English constantly. Captio AI follows all three. I stopped missing the key concepts that come in the code-switch."

Sneha K. 🇮🇳
sneha.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Mumbai

"Marathwada regional variety in my university lectures is distinct from standard Pune Marathi. Captio AI captions it accurately. I take full notes for the first time in my university career."

Amit P. 🇮🇳
amit.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Aurangabad

"SPPU lectures in formal Pune Marathi use Sanskrit vocabulary I don't lip-read well. Captio AI captures the academic register accurately. I follow lectures instead of guessing them."

Priya D. 🇮🇳
priya.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Pune

"Nagpuri Marathi in lectures sounds different from Pune Marathi on the lips. Captio AI handles both. Nagpur University lectures are accessible to me for the first time."

Rahul B. 🇮🇳
rahul.b***@gmail.com
Deaf student, Nagpur

"Mumbai University lectures mix Marathi, Hindi, and English constantly. Captio AI follows all three. I stopped missing the key concepts that come in the code-switch."

Sneha K. 🇮🇳
sneha.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Mumbai

"Marathwada regional variety in my university lectures is distinct from standard Pune Marathi. Captio AI captions it accurately. I take full notes for the first time in my university career."

Amit P. 🇮🇳
amit.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Aurangabad

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Marathi.

Captio AI is free to start

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