Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Swedish 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 Stockholm University, Uppsala University, Lund University, and KTH — Swedish-medium instruction at full academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and gruppdiskussioner where discussion is in Swedish, often with English research terminology. Captio AI handles both without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

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

📚Study groups

Study groups (studiegrupper) reviewing Swedish lecture material in student accommodation. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Lectures from Skånska or Norrland faculty whose Swedish carries regional phonological features. Captio AI handles Stockholm Swedish, Skånska, and Norrland varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Swedish
91.8%

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.

Swedish

Why Swedish is hard to understand

Pitch accent

  • Swedish uses two word tones to distinguish meaning — both invisible on the lips
  • Swedish has a lexical pitch accent system that distinguishes minimal pairs by tonal melody: 'anden' (the duck, Accent 1) versus 'anden' (the spirit, Accent 2) are identical on the lips but carry different pitch contours. In a Stockholm university lecture, the tonal distinction that changes word meaning throughout the professor's delivery is completely absent from the visual signal.

The sj-sound

  • Swedish /ɧ/ is produced deep in the throat — the most invisible consonant in the language
  • The Swedish sj-sound — in 'sjö' (lake), 'sju' (seven), 'skjuta' (to shoot) — is a voiceless postalveolar-velar fricative produced with the back of the tongue and the velum. The lips barely part. Its exact realisation varies by dialect but is always throat-produced and always invisible from the front of a lecture hall.

Skånska divergence

  • Southern Swedish sounds like Danish and moves the mouth differently
  • Swedish spoken in Skåne (Scania) has undergone Danish influence: rhotics are often uvular rather than alveolar, and the pitch accent system differs from Central Swedish. A deaf student calibrated to Stockholm Swedish finds a Malmö professor's lip patterns significantly shifted — vowel qualities, prosody, and the rhotic all producing different visual information.

Contracted fast speech

  • Colloquial Swedish contracts words beyond recognition of their written forms
  • Swedish fast speech contracts common sequences: 'det var' (it was) → 'deva', 'är det' (is it) → 'ede'. These contracted forms look and sound nothing like their written equivalents. In a university lecture delivered at natural pace, these contractions appear continuously in informal academic speech.

Vowel length quantity

  • Swedish vowel length is a phonemic contrast — invisible on the lips
  • Swedish has a quantity system where vowel length combined with consonant length is phonemically distinctive. 'Fil' (lane) versus 'fill' — the distinction is in duration. This is an acoustic property with no visual correlate. A deaf student tracking Swedish lip movements loses this phonemic dimension throughout any lecture.

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The Challenge

1.3 million Swedes with hearing loss — in a country that was the first to recognise sign language

Approximately 1.3 million people in Sweden — around 13% of the population — have some degree of hearing loss. Sweden has one of the oldest legal frameworks for sign language in the world: Swedish Sign Language (SSL) was formally recognised in 1981, decades before most other countries. The Swedish Public Employment Service provides specific programmes for deaf and hard of hearing people, and Swedish deaf education has a comparatively strong history. Despite this, research consistently shows a lower level of educational attainment for deaf people relative to the hearing population.

Swedish universities operate under the Higher Education Act, which requires institutions to support students with disabilities, and most major universities have a disability coordinator. However, the provision of live captioning in lectures is not standard — it is arranged case by case, depends on individual requests, and the pool of specialised academic interpreters is limited. A study in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research found that deaf and hard of hearing students in Sweden continue to be disadvantaged in educational attainment despite formal policy protections.

The combination of limited interpreter supply and the high communicative density of Swedish academic life — lectures, seminars, study groups, informal office hours — means that deaf and hard of hearing students at Stockholm University, Uppsala, or KTH are systematically excluded from a significant portion of their academic experience. Captio AI captions Swedish lecture speech in real time, handling Stockholm Swedish, Skånska, and Norrland varieties in a single session, so no Swedish lecture is beyond reach.

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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

"The Swedish pitch accent is invisible on the lips. 'Anden' the duck and 'anden' the spirit look the same. In a philosophy lecture that distinction matters. Captio AI captures it acoustically."

Maja L. 🇸🇪
maja.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Stockholm University

"The sj-sound is produced at the back of the throat. Nothing to see. Captio AI transcribes it correctly every time. Technical Swedish lectures are accessible now."

Erik J. 🇸🇪
erik.j***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, KTH, Stockholm

"My professor is from Malmö — Skånska. Different from Stockholm Swedish I grew up lip-reading. Captio AI handles both. Regional accent is no longer a barrier."

Frida H. 🇸🇪
frida.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lund University

"Swedish fast speech contracts words until they look nothing like the written form. Captio AI gets the contractions right. Uppsala seminars are accessible."

Anders K. 🇸🇪
anders.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Uppsala University

"The Swedish pitch accent is invisible on the lips. 'Anden' the duck and 'anden' the spirit look the same. In a philosophy lecture that distinction matters. Captio AI captures it acoustically."

Maja L. 🇸🇪
maja.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Stockholm University

"The sj-sound is produced at the back of the throat. Nothing to see. Captio AI transcribes it correctly every time. Technical Swedish lectures are accessible now."

Erik J. 🇸🇪
erik.j***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, KTH, Stockholm

"My professor is from Malmö — Skånska. Different from Stockholm Swedish I grew up lip-reading. Captio AI handles both. Regional accent is no longer a barrier."

Frida H. 🇸🇪
frida.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lund University

"Swedish fast speech contracts words until they look nothing like the written form. Captio AI gets the contractions right. Uppsala seminars are accessible."

Anders K. 🇸🇪
anders.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Uppsala University

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Swedish.

Captio AI is free to start

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