Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Italian 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 stand-ups and riunioni di team in Italian offices where updates come quickly in Italian. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

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

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Colloqui di valutazione and one-on-one meetings with a responsabile. Important conversations in Italian corporate culture where formal register and precise wording matter. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Riunioni aziendali and all-hands where the direzione addresses the whole company. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings with international teams where Italian and English mix — common in Milan and Rome's corporate sector. Live Translator follows every switch in real time.

Informal catch-ups

Pausa caffè conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups after the riunione. The informal moments in Italian offices where working relationships and context are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Italian
95.5%

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.

Italian

Why Italian is hard to understand

Geminate consonants

  • Italian geminate and single consonants look identical on the lips — distinguished only by duration
  • Italian distinguishes single and double consonants — fato/fatto, pala/palla — by duration of consonant closure and shortening of the preceding vowel. This is an acoustic distinction carried entirely in timing. On the lips, the two sounds look identical. In a fast meeting, a deaf participant has no visual signal to resolve which form was spoken.

North–South accent mix in national meetings

  • Milan, Naples, and Sicily expose three sharply different phonological systems in one meeting
  • A meeting with colleagues from Milan, Naples, and Sicily exposes three sharply different phonological systems simultaneously. Sicilian merges o→u and e→i. Neapolitan softens intervocalic consonants. Northern Italian devocalizes certain vowels. For a deaf participant, each regional accent requires a different calibration.

Southern consonant lenition

  • Southern Italian softens exactly the consonant shapes a lip-reader relies on
  • Southern Italian varieties — Neapolitan, Sicilian, Calabrian — commonly lenite intervocalic stops and fricatives: 'capire' may be pronounced with a near-approximant medial consonant in Neapolitan speech. In a meeting, this softens exactly the consonant shapes that a lip-reader relies on to distinguish words.

Unstressed vowel reduction

  • Fast Italian meeting speech compresses the vowel clarity of textbook Italian
  • In fast Italian meeting speech, unstressed vowels reduce toward a schwa-like quality. The vowel-rich clarity of textbook Italian — every syllable fully articulated — disappears in a real board meeting or standup. The signal that makes Italian relatively easy to parse at slow speed becomes compressed and reduced.

Italian–English code-switching in tech and finance

  • Milan corporate meetings demand two active phonological systems simultaneously
  • Milan's tech, finance, and fashion sectors run meetings that switch freely between Italian and English. Technical vocabulary, product names, and financial terms arrive in English with Italian phonology applied. For a deaf participant, parsing which language is currently active — and then applying the right phonological expectations — doubles the cognitive load.

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The Challenge

3.5 million Italians with hearing loss — and LIS was recognised only in 2021.

Italy has approximately 3.5 million people with some form of hearing loss, of whom around 70,000 are severely deaf. Italian employment data shows that 44% of people with disabilities aged 15–64 are employed, compared to 55.1% of the general population at the same age. More starkly, Italian Ministry of Welfare data indicates that only 3.5% of disabled people are employed nationally — with a gender gap where male disabled employment reaches 6.8% but female disabled employment is only 1.8%. For the Italian deaf and hard of hearing community, this employment gap is concentrated in the formal, meeting-intensive professional sector — in Milan's finance and tech industries, in Rome's public administration, and in the corporate environments that define mainstream professional advancement.

Italian Sign Language (Lingua dei segni italiana, LIS) was officially recognised as an official language of Italy only in 2021 — making Italy one of the last European Union member states to grant legal status to its national sign language. The decades before recognition meant that deaf education, interpreter training, and professional support infrastructure developed without the legal foundation that comparable systems in northern Europe had. Even since recognition, professional LIS interpreter provision in corporate meetings, daily standups, and client calls remains limited and difficult to access quickly.

Italy's corporate environments — particularly in Milan's finance, fashion, and tech sectors — are increasingly hybrid, making verbal meeting participation a daily requirement for professional visibility. For deaf and hard of hearing Italian professionals, the meeting room is where the gap between legal recognition and practical accessibility is felt most acutely. Captio AI captions Italian in real time — including the geminate consonants of standard Italian, the Neapolitan consonant lenition of a Southern colleague, and the Italian-English code-switching of a Milan tech standup — so that the daily meeting is something a deaf Italian professional can fully follow.

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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

"Milan tech meetings switch between Italian and English every few sentences. Captio AI follows both languages accurately. I know what every product decision means now without asking my team lead to translate the English parts."

Marco R. 🇮🇹
marco.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech company, Milan

"Italian board meetings use geminate consonants and formal vocabulary that look identical on the lips even to someone who lip-reads professionally. Captio AI gives me the full transcript in real time. The boardroom is accessible for the first time."

Giulia F. 🇮🇹
giulia.f***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, finance sector, Milan

"Neapolitan Italian in a team meeting sounds very different from standard Italian and most tools collapse it. Captio AI handles the regional phonology accurately. The morning briefing and the client call are both fully accessible now."

Antonio N. 🇮🇹
antonio.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Naples

"Rome office Italian mixes the local accent with formal Italian in the same meeting. Captio AI handles both registers. I can follow the full meeting agenda and the informal discussion that follows without asking a colleague to fill me in."

Sara P. 🇮🇹
sara.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, NGO, Rome

"Milan tech meetings switch between Italian and English every few sentences. Captio AI follows both languages accurately. I know what every product decision means now without asking my team lead to translate the English parts."

Marco R. 🇮🇹
marco.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech company, Milan

"Italian board meetings use geminate consonants and formal vocabulary that look identical on the lips even to someone who lip-reads professionally. Captio AI gives me the full transcript in real time. The boardroom is accessible for the first time."

Giulia F. 🇮🇹
giulia.f***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, finance sector, Milan

"Neapolitan Italian in a team meeting sounds very different from standard Italian and most tools collapse it. Captio AI handles the regional phonology accurately. The morning briefing and the client call are both fully accessible now."

Antonio N. 🇮🇹
antonio.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Naples

"Rome office Italian mixes the local accent with formal Italian in the same meeting. Captio AI handles both registers. I can follow the full meeting agenda and the informal discussion that follows without asking a colleague to fill me in."

Sara P. 🇮🇹
sara.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, NGO, Rome

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Italian.

Captio AI is free to start

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