Japanese 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 Japanese meetings
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Japanese 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.
Morning ミーティング and ホウレンソウ team syncs where updates come in rapid, formal Japanese. Captio AI captions each person so you follow every agenda item.
Zoom or Teams calls with colleagues domestically or with overseas partners. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.
評価面談 and one-on-one check-ins with a 上司. High-stakes conversations in Japanese corporate culture where keigo and precise wording matter. Captio AI transcribes everything.
全体会議 and company-wide town halls where leadership presents to all staff. Captio AI captions every word regardless of your seat.
Meetings with overseas teams where Japanese and English switch — increasingly common in Japanese multinational workplaces. Live Translator follows every switch.
Break room conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups after the meeting. The informal moments in Japanese offices where context and relationships are also built. Captio AI covers those too.
Most accurate and fastest models
character 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 Japanese is hard to understand
Minimal lip movement
- Japanese speakers articulate with almost no visible lip movement
- Japanese speakers articulate with significantly less lip movement than speakers of European languages — a physiological difference documented in research comparing visual speech perception across languages. In a conference room or on a video call, almost no lip shape information is available for a deaf participant to read.
Pitch accent system
- Japanese words differ by pitch pattern — invisible on the lips
- Japanese pitch accent distinguishes words that are otherwise identical in consonants and vowels — hashi (bridge), hashi (chopsticks), hashi (edge). In a meeting, technical vocabulary and product names depend on these pitch distinctions being heard, not seen.
Keigo register in business speech
- Formal Japanese business speech is a phonologically different register from casual conversation
- Japanese business meetings require formal honorific speech (keigo) throughout. Keigo introduces morphological forms — itadaku, kudasaru, irassharu — that do not appear in casual conversation, creating a phonological texture that is effectively a different register. A deaf person who has some familiarity with casual Japanese encounters an almost unfamiliar sound pattern in a formal meeting.
Kanto–Kansai pitch gap
- Tokyo and Osaka use entirely different pitch accent systems for the same words
- Standard Tokyo Japanese and Kansai-dialect Japanese (Osaka, Kyoto) use entirely different pitch accent systems. In a national company meeting, a Kansai-accented speaker and a Tokyo-accented speaker produce different pitch patterns for the same words — a deaf person calibrated to one regional system misreads the other.
Rapid formal cadence
- Japanese meeting turns are short, fast, and leave almost no processing window
- Japanese business culture favors concise, rapid delivery with minimal pauses. Speakers complete their formal turn quickly and yield. There is almost no processing window between contributions — a deaf participant who misses a turn in a Japanese meeting has very little time to recover before the next speaker has begun.
Download for free
Download on theApp Store350,000 deaf and 6 million hard of hearing Japanese professionals — most locked out of white-collar work.
Japan has an estimated 350,000 deaf people and a further 6 million who experience significant hearing difficulty but do not qualify for a formal disability certificate under Japan's criteria. White-collar professional employment has historically been inaccessible for deaf and hard of hearing people in Japan. Most deaf employment is concentrated in factories, trade occupations, or self-employment — a pattern documented across multiple government surveys. In a 2007 survey, only 20% of deaf high school graduates secured 'welfare-oriented' positions, typically below minimum wage with support staff to assist disabled employees. Access to salaried, meeting-intensive professional roles remains rare.
Japanese Sign Language (JSL) was legally recognised only in 2011, and the recognition of sign language rights has expanded gradually at the prefectural level since then. However, professional interpreter provision for corporate meetings remains limited. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare mandates reasonable accommodation duties for employers, but practical compliance in daily meeting environments — standups, client calls, all-hands — is inconsistent. Research published in PMC (2015) identified that Japanese women with hearing loss face compounded disadvantages in employment compared to hearing women, adding a gender dimension to an already constrained labour market access.
Japan's workforce is navigating a structural shift toward remote and hybrid work, which means more meetings, more video calls, and more reliance on verbal communication than any previous era of Japanese professional life. For the 6 million Japanese workers with hearing difficulty who lack disability certification — and therefore formal accommodation rights — this shift has increased rather than reduced the communication gap at work. Captio AI captions Japanese meeting speech in real time, including the keigo of formal presentations, the faster informal speech of team discussion, and the Kansai-accented voices of regional colleagues.
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
"Japanese business meetings are dense keigo at speed with almost no lip movement. Captio AI is the only tool I have found that handles the formal register accurately. I can follow the all-hands and the team standup without a sign language interpreter."
"My team is split between Osaka and Tokyo offices. Kansai pitch accent and Tokyo pitch accent on the same video call used to mean I missed half the meeting. Captio AI follows both dialects. I know what every Osaka colleague said now."
"Client presentations in polished keigo move fast. Captio AI keeps up with the formal speech and then follows the Q&A when the register drops. I stopped relying on my colleague to brief me on what the client actually said."
"Our Fukuoka team meetings mix regional Japanese with English technical vocabulary. Captio AI handles the code-switching and the regional accent. The nomikai conversation is now as accessible as the meeting itself."
"Japanese business meetings are dense keigo at speed with almost no lip movement. Captio AI is the only tool I have found that handles the formal register accurately. I can follow the all-hands and the team standup without a sign language interpreter."
"My team is split between Osaka and Tokyo offices. Kansai pitch accent and Tokyo pitch accent on the same video call used to mean I missed half the meeting. Captio AI follows both dialects. I know what every Osaka colleague said now."
"Client presentations in polished keigo move fast. Captio AI keeps up with the formal speech and then follows the Q&A when the register drops. I stopped relying on my colleague to brief me on what the client actually said."
"Our Fukuoka team meetings mix regional Japanese with English technical vocabulary. Captio AI handles the code-switching and the regional accent. The nomikai conversation is now as accessible as the meeting itself."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Follow every word in Japanese.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store