Estonian 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 Estonian meetings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Estonian 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
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Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Daily meeskonna koosolekud and stand-ups in Estonian offices where updates come in Estonian or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.
Teams or Zoom calls with colleagues across Estonia or internationally. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.
Arenguvestlused and one-on-one sessions with a juht. Important conversations in Estonian corporate culture where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.
Company-wide üldkoosolekud where management addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.
Meetings that mix Estonian and English — standard in Tallinn's startup and tech sector. Live Translator follows any switch in real time.
Kohvipaus conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Estonian 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 Estonian is hard to understand
Three-degree quantity
- Short, long, and overlong — a three-way distinction invisible on the lips
- Estonian is one of very few languages with a ternary phonological quantity system — Q1 (short), Q2 (long), and Q3 (overlong) — in both vowels and consonants. Minimal pairs distinguished only by quantity degree produce no visible lip movement difference. In a meeting, a deaf attendee cannot recover these contrasts by watching the speaker's mouth.
Vowel inventory
- 9 vowels and 36 diphthongs create a complex acoustic landscape
- Estonian has 9 vowel phonemes and 36 diphthongs — 28 of which are native to the language. In fast corporate speech, diphthong quality distinctions reduce and monophthongs converge. For a deaf professional in a Tallinn meeting, vowel-dependent word distinctions that are clear in deliberate speech blur at meeting pace.
South Estonian gap
- South Estonian (Võro/Seto) is effectively a separate language
- South Estonian — particularly Võro and Seto — is widely considered a separate Finnic language rather than a dialect of Estonian. In a meeting with a colleague from the Võrumaa or Setomaa region who uses Southern features in informal speech, the phonological departure from standard Estonian is substantial enough to disrupt comprehension entirely.
Vowel harmony loss
- Unexpected front-back vowel combinations arise from lost harmony
- Unlike Finnish, Estonian has lost its strict vowel harmony, leaving forms where front and back vowels coexist in ways that violate listener expectations. In fast meeting speech, these unexpected vowel sequences in loanwords and inflected forms create acoustic patterns that a deaf attendee does not anticipate.
English code-switching
- Estonian tech and startup meetings are heavily English-integrated
- Estonia's globally recognised e-governance, fintech, and startup culture means that professional meetings routinely mix Estonian and English — sometimes with English as the dominant language even in all-Estonian teams. The switch between Estonian and English phonology in the same sentence demands constant recalibration from a deaf attendee.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss and workplace exclusion in Estonia
Estonia, with a population of approximately 1.3 million, has an active deaf community represented by the Estonian Association of the Deaf and recognised by the European Union of the Deaf. The GBD 2019 study (The Lancet / PMC7960691) estimates global hearing loss prevalence at approximately one in five people — a rate that suggests roughly 260,000 Estonians living with some degree of hearing difficulty. Estonia's advanced digital infrastructure has facilitated some accessibility gains in public services, but real-time workplace meeting accessibility remains largely unstructured.
The WHO's global hearing loss data (WHO fact sheet, 2023) documents that hearing loss affects professional participation disproportionately in all countries, reducing employment rates, income, and career progression. Estonia's internationally integrated tech and startup economy — where English and Estonian are both used as professional languages — creates an environment where deaf professionals must track two phonological systems simultaneously in the same meeting. Estonian Sign Language is recognised, but interpreter provision for corporate meetings is limited, particularly in smaller companies outside Tallinn.
Estonia's ternary quantity system — the three-degree vowel and consonant length contrast — is one of the most distinctive and acoustically demanding phonological features in any European language. It is entirely invisible on the lips, entirely inaudible with significant hearing loss, and outside the training data of most generic captioning tools. For a deaf professional in a Tallinn fintech, a Tartu university meeting, or a Narva manufacturing briefing, real-time Estonian captions are the only reliable access tool. Captio AI provides those captions on a personal device, without interpreter scheduling or institutional infrastructure.
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
"Our standups are half Estonian, half English. Captio AI follows both languages without losing the switch. I catch every product decision and release goal without asking for a recap."
"Estonian quantity distinctions are completely invisible when lip-reading. Captio AI captures the full acoustic signal and I follow every inter-agency meeting without an interpreter."
"Tartu has its own speech rhythm and some Southern Estonian features. Captio AI handles the variety accurately and I follow every academic meeting and seminar without gaps."
"Narva offices use Estonian and Russian. Captio AI handles both languages in the same session and I follow every production briefing accurately without needing a summary after the fact."
"Our standups are half Estonian, half English. Captio AI follows both languages without losing the switch. I catch every product decision and release goal without asking for a recap."
"Estonian quantity distinctions are completely invisible when lip-reading. Captio AI captures the full acoustic signal and I follow every inter-agency meeting without an interpreter."
"Tartu has its own speech rhythm and some Southern Estonian features. Captio AI handles the variety accurately and I follow every academic meeting and seminar without gaps."
"Narva offices use Estonian and Russian. Captio AI handles both languages in the same session and I follow every production briefing accurately without needing a summary after the fact."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Follow every word in Estonian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store