French live captions and productivity tool for meetings
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
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Everything you need to follow French meetings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing French 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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Every situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Daily stand-ups and réunions d'équipe in French offices where colleagues speak in rapid succession. Captio AI captions each person so you follow every point.
Teams or Zoom calls with colleagues across France or internationally. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.
Entretiens annuels and one-on-one meetings with a responsable. High-stakes conversations in French corporate culture where formal language and precise wording matter. Captio AI transcribes everything.
Réunions plénières and all-hands where the direction addresses the whole company. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.
Meetings with international teams where French and English mix — or where francophone colleagues from different regions join. Live Translator follows every switch.
Pause café conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups after the réunion. The informal moments in French workplaces where context and collegiality 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
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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 French is hard to understand
Liaison in fast formal speech
- French liaison creates consonant bridges that a lip-reader cannot anticipate
- French liaison links words by pronouncing otherwise-silent final consonants before vowel-initial words: 'vous avez' → 'vouz-avez'. In a fast meeting, this creates consonant-vowel bridges that look completely different on the lips from what a lip-reader would expect knowing the two words in isolation.
Elision and enchaînement
- French word boundaries restructure completely in fast meeting speech
- Elision removes vowels ('je ai' → 'j'ai') and enchaînement resyllabifies across word boundaries. In fast meeting speech, the acoustic word boundaries bear no relationship to the orthographic word boundaries — a deaf participant reading text alongside the speaker finds the spoken form systematically restructured.
Nasal vowel mergers
- French nasal vowels that carry grammatical meaning are gradually merging
- Metropolitan French is gradually merging the nasal vowels /œ̃/ (as in 'un') and /ɛ̃/ (as in 'in'). In fast meeting speech, nasal vowels that carry grammatical distinctions — gender marking, number — begin to blur together. A deaf participant relying on any residual hearing loses the grammatical signal.
Québécois vs European French
- Paris and Montreal French are two distinct phonological systems in one multinational call
- A multinational meeting with colleagues from Paris and Montreal presents two phonological systems simultaneously. Québécois French has distinct vowel shifts, diphthongisation, and affrication (ts/dz sounds for t/d before i and u) that make the same word sound markedly different from European French.
Fast connected speech reduction
- French meeting speech contracts to forms unrecognisable from formal textbook French
- In French business meetings, rapid connected speech contracts aggressively: 'il y a' → 'ya', 'tu as' → 't'as', 'je ne sais pas' → 'chais pas'. The gap between formal French taught in schools and the fast reduced speech of a real standup is extreme — and a deaf participant who learned from formal French is decoding a different language.
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5–6 million French people with hearing loss — and most French meetings remain inaccessible.
France has approximately 5–6 million people with some form of hearing loss, of whom around 300,000 are severely or profoundly deaf. France's disability employment framework has required companies with 20 or more employees to maintain a 6% disabled workforce since 1987 — one of the oldest and most structured disability employment obligations in Europe. Employers who do not meet the quota pay contributions to AGEFIPH, the fund for the professional integration of people with disabilities. Despite this framework, deaf and hard of hearing workers face specific challenges that the quota alone does not address: communication access in daily meetings, client calls, and professional development conversations is not mandated, and many companies comply with the quota without making meeting environments accessible.
Langue des signes française (LSF) was legally recognised in 2005. However, professional LSF interpreter provision for corporate meetings remains inadequate. AGEFIPH and FIPHFP (the public sector equivalent) support workplace accommodation costs, but the process of requesting and funding interpreter access for regular daily meetings is slow, administratively complex, and rarely used for recurring professional communication needs. Most deaf French employees navigating corporate meetings do so without real-time access to what is being said.
France's professional culture is heavily meeting-centred — daily standups, client presentations, cross-functional alignments, and the informal réunion informelle that follows the formal meeting are all contexts where career advancement is communicated and decided. For the 300,000 profoundly deaf people in France and the millions more with significant hearing difficulty, these environments represent a structural barrier to professional equality. Captio AI captions French meeting speech in real time — including the liaison-rich formal presentations of a Paris board meeting, the fast contracted speech of a startup standup, and the Québécois-accented voices of Canadian colleagues on a multinational call — so every professional meeting is fully accessible.
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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.
Private by default
Captio AI supports 60+ languages
Download for free
Frequently asked questions
Follow every word in French.
Captio AI is free to start
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