Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Basque live captions and productivity tool for meetings

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.

🔄Stand-ups and team syncs

Daily talde bilerak and stand-ups in Basque offices where updates come in Basque or Spanish. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Teams or Zoom calls with colleagues across the Basque Country or internationally. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Errendimendu ebaluazioak and one-on-one sessions with a arduradunak. Important conversations where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Company-wide batzar nagusiak where management addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Basque, Spanish, and English — common in Bilbao and Donostia's corporate sector. Live Translator follows any switch.

Informal catch-ups

Kafesalda break conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Basque workplaces where working relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Basque
89.3%

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 speed of a real meeting

Captions while they are still speaking

Words appear on screen as each person talks — not after they finish. You read what someone is saying at the same moment everyone else hears it.

Works in any meeting format

Conference rooms, open-plan offices, video calls, all-hands. Place the phone on the table or hold it — Captio AI handles the rest.

Handles fast speech and crosstalk

Captio AI is designed for real meetings, not controlled dictation. It follows whoever is speaking loudest at any moment, keeping up with the natural pace of discussion.

No setup, no explaining

Open the app and place the phone. No pairing, no telling colleagues what you are doing, no requesting anything from the meeting organiser.

Review everything after

Record the meeting and upload it to Audio Transcription for a full written record. Use AI Summary to extract decisions and action items so nothing from the meeting gets lost.

60+ languages

For international teams, multilingual meetings, or colleagues who switch between languages mid-discussion. No setup required — Captio AI detects and captions in real time.

Basque

Why Basque is hard to understand

Six sibilants

  • Basque distinguishes six voiceless sibilants invisible on the lips
  • Basque has a typologically rare system of six voiceless sibilants — apical and laminal pairs for fricatives, affricates, and one additional fricative — that are phonemically distinct but produce minimal visible lip movement differences. In a meeting, minimal pairs distinguished only by sibilant placement are entirely unrecoverable by lip-reading.

Souletin divergence

  • Souletin Basque is barely intelligible with standard Batua
  • Of Basque's six major dialect groups — Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan, High Navarrese, Lower Navarrese, Lapurdian, and Souletin — the Souletin (Zuberoan) variety is the most divergent, having acquired a sixth oral vowel, nasal vowels, and voiced sibilants that do not exist in other Basque dialects or in Unified Basque (Batua). A deaf attendee calibrated to Batua finds Souletin speech essentially opaque.

Batua vs. regional speech

  • Unified Basque and regional speech diverge in informal meetings
  • Unified Basque (Euskara Batua) was standardised for writing and formal use, but informal professional speech draws heavily from Bizkaian or Gipuzkoan dialect features. In an informal Bilbao meeting, a speaker may shift between Batua and regional dialect mid-discussion, creating a moving phonological target for a deaf attendee.

Code-switching with Spanish

  • Basque and Spanish alternate in every professional setting
  • In the Basque Country and Navarre, professional meetings routinely switch between Basque and Spanish in the same sentence. For a deaf attendee tracking Basque phonology — with its unique consonant system and agglutinative morphology — the shift to Spanish represents a full phonological reset mid-sentence.

Aspirated stops in northern dialects

  • Lapurdian and Souletin consonants change word identity
  • Northern Basque dialects — Lapurdian and Souletin — preserve voiceless aspirated stops that have been lost in southern (Spanish Basque) varieties. In a cross-border meeting with colleagues from the French Basque Country, aspirated consonants that do not exist in the listener's dialect create ambiguity that neither lip-reading nor partial hearing can resolve.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and workplace access in the Basque Country

Around five million people in Spain are living with hearing loss — approximately 10% of the population — according to the most recent EuroTrak survey, with fewer than 40% using hearing aids. The Basque Country (Euskadi), with a population of approximately 2.2 million, has one of Spain's highest GDP per capita but faces the same structural gap between hearing loss prevalence and workplace accessibility as the rest of the country. The INE EDAD 2008 National Disability Survey counted 1,064,000 people across Spain with a diagnosed hearing or deafness disability — a figure widely considered an undercount due to stigma and under-reporting.

Basque adds a language-specific dimension to the access gap. Basque is a language isolate — unrelated to any other living language — and its phonology, morphology, and syntax share no features with Spanish, French, or any Indo-European language. This means that captioning tools built primarily for Indo-European languages are especially poorly adapted to Basque. The Basque Government (Eusko Jaurlaritza) mandates Basque as a required language in public-sector employment in Euskadi, meaning that deaf employees in government, education, and public services are legally required to work in Basque-medium meetings — without any structural provision of real-time captioning in that language.

Spanish disability research (FIAPAS 2021) and Basque Country public health studies document consistent gaps between legal accessibility obligations and actual provision in professional and educational settings. For a deaf professional in a Bilbao bank, a Vitoria government office, or a San Sebastián technology company, participation in Basque-medium meetings requires either a Basque-capable real-time captioning tool or a dedicated interpreter — and the latter is not routinely available. Captio AI captions Basque in real time, handling Batua, Bizkaian, and Gipuzkoan varieties, so a deaf professional follows every word of a Basque meeting as it is spoken.

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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

"Our departmental meetings are conducted in Batua — Basque is mandatory. Captio AI handles formal Basque accurately and I follow every policy discussion without needing an interpreter to attend."

Iker A. 🇪🇸
iker.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Basque government, Vitoria-Gasteiz

"Our standups mix Basque and Spanish in every other sentence. Captio AI follows both languages without losing the switch. I catch every release decision and sprint goal without asking for a retype."

Miren E. 🇪🇸
miren.e***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, technology company, San Sebastián

"Bilbao office speech is Bizkaian Basque, not Batua — the vocabulary is different. Captio AI handles the Bizkaian variety accurately and I follow every production briefing and safety meeting without gaps."

Josu G. 🇪🇸
josu.g***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, manufacturing company, Bilbao

"Northern Lapurdian Basque from Bayonne has different consonants from Spanish Basque. Captio AI handles the northern variety and I follow every cross-border team meeting without missing the context."

Amaia Z. 🇫🇷
amaia.z***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, cultural organisation, Bayonne (French Basque Country)

"Our departmental meetings are conducted in Batua — Basque is mandatory. Captio AI handles formal Basque accurately and I follow every policy discussion without needing an interpreter to attend."

Iker A. 🇪🇸
iker.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Basque government, Vitoria-Gasteiz

"Our standups mix Basque and Spanish in every other sentence. Captio AI follows both languages without losing the switch. I catch every release decision and sprint goal without asking for a retype."

Miren E. 🇪🇸
miren.e***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, technology company, San Sebastián

"Bilbao office speech is Bizkaian Basque, not Batua — the vocabulary is different. Captio AI handles the Bizkaian variety accurately and I follow every production briefing and safety meeting without gaps."

Josu G. 🇪🇸
josu.g***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, manufacturing company, Bilbao

"Northern Lapurdian Basque from Bayonne has different consonants from Spanish Basque. Captio AI handles the northern variety and I follow every cross-border team meeting without missing the context."

Amaia Z. 🇫🇷
amaia.z***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, cultural organisation, Bayonne (French Basque Country)

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Basque.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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