Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Finnish live captions and productivity tool for meetings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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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 tiimipalaverit and stand-ups in Finnish offices where colleagues give concise updates. Captio AI captions each person so you follow every point.

📹Video calls

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

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Kehityskeskustelut and one-on-one sessions with an esimies. Important conversations in Finnish corporate culture where directness and clarity matter. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Koko henkilöstön kokoukset and all-hands where johto addresses the whole company. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings with international teams where Finnish and English mix — common in Helsinki's tech sector. Live Translator follows every switch.

Informal catch-ups

Kahvitauko conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Finnish offices where working relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Finnish
89.4%

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.

Finnish

Why Finnish is hard to understand

Geminate consonants

  • Finnish distinguishes single and double (geminate) consonants that completely change word meaning — but the duration difference vanishes at meeting pace
  • Finnish geminate consonants ('kuka' vs 'kukka', 'tuli' vs 'tulli') produce a longer hold of the articulation that is visible in careful speech but vanishes at meeting pace. Single and geminate are phonemically distinct across the entire Finnish vocabulary. A deaf or hard of hearing person lip-reading a Finnish meeting cannot distinguish these pairs, creating systematic vocabulary ambiguity in every sentence.

Vowel length contrasts

  • Finnish also distinguishes short and long vowels phonemically — combined with geminate consonants, giving four-way length contrasts that collapse at meeting speed
  • Finnish has phonemic vowel length in addition to consonant length: 'tuli' (fire) vs 'tuuli' (wind) vs 'tulli' (customs). These contrasts form a two-dimensional phonemic system. At meeting pace, both vowel length and consonant length distinctions compress and the visual signal provides only two positions rather than four — creating systematic ambiguity for a deaf person lip-reading any Finnish word with length contrasts.

Vowel harmony suffixes

  • Finnish's vowel harmony creates predictable but invisible grammatical endings in agglutinative suffixes that neutralize at meeting pace
  • Finnish's vowel harmony divides its eight vowels into front and back sets, with all suffixes harmonizing with the root. At meeting pace, the harmonized suffix vowels reduce toward neutral positions that reveal nothing about which harmony class they belong to. A deaf lip-reader tracking Finnish word endings cannot determine case or verb person from the visual signal alone.

Eastern vs Western dialects

  • Eastern Finnish (Savonian) and Western Finnish differ in diphthong patterns and consonant gradation visible on the lips
  • Savonian Finnish (the Eastern dialect group) has distinctive diphthong patterns and consonant gradation realisations that differ markedly from Helsinki standard. In a meeting connecting Helsinki and Kuopio or Joensuu colleagues, a deaf person lip-reading Standard Southern Finnish encounters Savonian speech whose diphthong shapes and prosody look different on the lips from the standard they have learned.

Finnish–English code-switching

  • Finnish corporate and tech meetings integrate English heavily — one of the most English-integrated professional environments in Northern Europe
  • Finland's technology sector is among the most globally prominent in per-capita terms, and Finnish corporate meetings routinely include English documentation and English terms delivered mid-Finnish sentence. In a Helsinki tech meeting, sentences may be structurally Finnish but contain English technical vocabulary. A deaf person lip-reading Finnish encounters these English segments as unexpected phonological mismatches.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and workplace exclusion in Finland

In Finland, there are approximately 14,000 sign language users who define themselves as a linguistic and cultural minority, with around 5,000 people who are profoundly deaf and use Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) as their mother tongue. Finnish Sign Language was recognised in the Finnish constitution in 1995 — one of the first countries in the world to achieve constitutional recognition for a sign language. The Finnish Association of the Deaf (Kuurojen Liitto), founded in 1905, operates through 39 member associations and has advocated for deaf rights for over a century, providing services and knowledge to deaf and hard of hearing Finns.

Despite Finland's progressive legal framework, the gap between sign language rights and professional meeting accessibility persists. The Finnish technology sector — home to globally prominent companies — conducts its internal meetings in a dense mix of Finnish and English that shifts mid-sentence. For a deaf professional in a Helsinki tech company, the standard standup or sprint planning meeting requires following fast Finnish speech with English code-switching, at a pace and register that existing accessibility tools were not designed for.

Finland's manufacturing, engineering, and services sectors — major employers in Tampere, Turku, Oulu, and Jyväskylä — operate in meeting-heavy professional cultures where verbal communication is continuous. The four-way length contrast system of Finnish (short vowel/long vowel/single consonant/geminate consonant) creates a phonological density that no visual speech perception system can fully resolve. For a deaf professional in any Finnish workplace, real-time captioning that handles Finnish's phonemic length contrasts is the only tool that bridges this gap.

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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

"Helsinki tech standups are fast Finnish with English terms mid-sentence. Captio AI follows both languages in real time. I catch every blocker and action item without asking my team lead to slow down."

Mikko L. 🇫🇮
mikko.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech company, Helsinki

"Tampere Finnish has its own regional character and the geminate consonant pairs disappear at meeting speed. Captio AI handles the regional variety and gives me the full text in real time. Team meetings are accessible for the first time."

Aino H. 🇫🇮
aino.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, manufacturing company, Tampere

"Northern Oulu Finnish sounds different from Helsinki standard and the long/short vowel distinction collapses at meeting pace. Captio AI handles the Northern variety accurately. The project briefing is fully accessible now."

Pekka V. 🇫🇮
pekka.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, engineering company, Oulu

"Healthcare Finnish in Turku uses Southwest Finnish vowel qualities that look different from Helsinki. Captio AI captures the regional phonology accurately. The clinical team briefing is accessible and I know every patient-care decision."

Siiri K. 🇫🇮
siiri.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, healthcare company, Turku

"Helsinki tech standups are fast Finnish with English terms mid-sentence. Captio AI follows both languages in real time. I catch every blocker and action item without asking my team lead to slow down."

Mikko L. 🇫🇮
mikko.l***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech company, Helsinki

"Tampere Finnish has its own regional character and the geminate consonant pairs disappear at meeting speed. Captio AI handles the regional variety and gives me the full text in real time. Team meetings are accessible for the first time."

Aino H. 🇫🇮
aino.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, manufacturing company, Tampere

"Northern Oulu Finnish sounds different from Helsinki standard and the long/short vowel distinction collapses at meeting pace. Captio AI handles the Northern variety accurately. The project briefing is fully accessible now."

Pekka V. 🇫🇮
pekka.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, engineering company, Oulu

"Healthcare Finnish in Turku uses Southwest Finnish vowel qualities that look different from Helsinki. Captio AI captures the regional phonology accurately. The clinical team briefing is accessible and I know every patient-care decision."

Siiri K. 🇫🇮
siiri.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, healthcare company, Turku

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Finnish.

Captio AI is free to start

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