Dutch live captions and productivity tool for meetings
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Dutch meetings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Dutch speakers.
Follow the meeting as it happens
- Captions appear word by word while speakers are still talking
- Works in conference rooms, boardrooms, and open offices
- Handles fast-paced discussion and multiple speakers
- No setup — place the phone on the table and start
International and multilingual meetings
- Each person speaks their own language
- You read in yours, in real time
- 60+ languages, no mode switching
- Handles mid-sentence language changes
Full transcript after the meeting
- Upload the recording and get a complete written transcript
- Organised by speaker — know exactly who said what
- Review decisions and action items at your own pace
- Searchable, copyable, shareable
Decisions and action items, extracted
- Key points and decisions pulled from any transcript
- Action items surfaced automatically
- Organised into sections — not one continuous block
- Works on any Captio AI meeting transcript
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Daily stand-ups and teamoverleg in Dutch offices where colleagues give updates in rapid Dutch. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every point.
Teams or Zoom calls with colleagues across the Netherlands or internationally. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.
Functioneringsgesprekken and one-on-one sessions with a leidinggevende. Important conversations in Dutch corporate culture where directness and precision matter. Captio AI transcribes everything.
Bedrijfsbrede vergaderingen and all-hands where the directie addresses the whole company. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.
Meetings with international teams where Dutch and English mix — standard in Amsterdam's global corporate sector. Live Translator follows every switch.
Koffiepauze conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Dutch offices where working relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
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.
Why Dutch is hard to understand
Uvular fricatives
- Dutch g and ch — the guttural fricatives unique to Dutch — are produced entirely at the back of the throat with no visible lip movement
- The Dutch voiced and voiceless velar/uvular fricatives /ɣ/ and /x/ (as in 'goed' and 'lach') are produced deep in the throat with the lips open and still. In a meeting, a deaf or hard of hearing person lip-reading a Dutch speaker sees only the surrounding vowels — the guttural that gives Dutch its distinctive character is completely invisible and unresolvable from visual cues alone.
Netherlands vs Flemish
- Netherlands Dutch and Belgian Flemish differ enough in phonology and prosody to read as distinct varieties on the lips
- Belgian Flemish retains its own uvular /r/ realisation, vowel quality, and prosodic pattern that diverges from Randstad Dutch. In a multinational meeting with both Dutch and Belgian participants, a deaf lip-reader familiar with Amsterdam Dutch encounters a systematically different spoken register from a Ghent or Antwerp colleague — different enough to disrupt recognition.
Diphthong reduction
- Dutch diphthongs reduce in fast meeting speech in ways that remove their visual distinctiveness
- Dutch has a rich inventory of diphthongs (/ɛi/, /œy/, /ɑu/) that are visually distinctive when produced carefully but that reduce or monophthongize at the speed of a normal business meeting. A hard of hearing person who has learned to read careful Dutch speech encounters a compressed version in a meeting where these distinctive shapes disappear.
Regional dialect diversity
- Dutch has over a dozen distinct regional dialects — Limburgs, Zeeuws, Gronings — with phonology and vocabulary that differ from standard
- A meeting including a Limburg speaker, a Rotterdam speaker, and a Groningen speaker presents three phonological systems that share written Dutch but sound different. Limburgs Dutch even has a tonal distinction — rare in a Germanic language — that a deaf person lip-reading cannot detect at all.
Fast casual reduction
- Spoken Dutch at meeting pace drops syllables and reduces function words to near-invisibility
- At conversational speed, Dutch function words reduce heavily — 'het' becomes a schwa, 'een' reduces to a schwa, word endings elide. The spoken Dutch of a meeting sounds quite different from its written form, and a hard of hearing person familiar with written Dutch may find the spoken register at meeting pace largely unrecognisable from the lips.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss and workplace exclusion in the Netherlands
A 2025 study published in the journal WORK (PMC12231822) examined employment outcomes for 5,609 deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the Netherlands who had claimed sensory disability care between 2015 and 2019. The study found that despite broadly similar employment participation rates, DHH workers are significantly more likely to draw income from sick leave, disability pension, or other social benefits than a matched hearing population — pointing to an underlying vulnerability in employment stability rather than in job entry alone. Hearing decline begins at younger ages in modern working populations and accelerates around age 50, meaning hearing impairment affects a substantial proportion of Dutch workers in prime career years.
The longitudinal Netherlands Hearing Study (NL-SH) tracks hearing aid uptake and workplace functioning in Dutch working populations, confirming that communication difficulties in meetings are consistently the most significant barrier reported. Yet meeting accessibility accommodations — real-time captioning, remote interpreter access, captioned video calls — are rarely standard in Dutch workplace practice. The gap between statutory disability rights under Dutch law and the practical provision of meeting accessibility remains the lived reality for most deaf and hard of hearing Dutch professionals.
Belgium's Flemish community and the Netherlands share a language but operate under different disability policy frameworks, meaning a deaf professional in Ghent and one in Amsterdam navigate entirely different legal and support systems. This fragmentation means that cross-border meetings — common in Dutch-Belgian corporate and logistics settings — present an accessibility challenge without a unified policy response. For the large numbers of deaf professionals who work across this border, every cross-border meeting is a different accessibility system.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"Amsterdam standups are fast and the function words drop completely at speed. Captio AI captures the full sentence including the grammar I couldn't follow on the lips. I finally know what the blocker is without asking someone to repeat."
"Rotterdam Dutch sounds different from standard and the guttural g makes every word look the same on the lips. Captio AI handles the Rotterdam accent and I read the full dispatch briefing in real time."
"Cross-border calls with Amsterdam colleagues always felt inaccessible — their Dutch sounds completely different from Ghent Flemish. Captio AI handles both varieties in the same session. The weekly all-hands is accessible for the first time."
"Healthcare Dutch in Eindhoven includes heavy Brabantian intonation that isn't standard. Captio AI handles the regional phonology and I follow every detail of the patient-flow briefing accurately."
"Amsterdam standups are fast and the function words drop completely at speed. Captio AI captures the full sentence including the grammar I couldn't follow on the lips. I finally know what the blocker is without asking someone to repeat."
"Rotterdam Dutch sounds different from standard and the guttural g makes every word look the same on the lips. Captio AI handles the Rotterdam accent and I read the full dispatch briefing in real time."
"Cross-border calls with Amsterdam colleagues always felt inaccessible — their Dutch sounds completely different from Ghent Flemish. Captio AI handles both varieties in the same session. The weekly all-hands is accessible for the first time."
"Healthcare Dutch in Eindhoven includes heavy Brabantian intonation that isn't standard. Captio AI handles the regional phonology and I follow every detail of the patient-flow briefing accurately."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Follow every word in Dutch.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store