Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Kannada 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

Team meetings and stand-ups in Bengaluru and Mysuru offices where updates come in Kannada or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Google Meet or Teams calls with colleagues across Karnataka or nationally. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Performance reviews and one-on-one sessions with a reporting manager. High-stakes conversations where nothing should be missed. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Company-wide meetings where leadership presents to the full team. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Kannada, English, and Hindi — standard in Bengaluru's global tech offices. Live Translator follows every switch.

Informal catch-ups

Coffee break conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Karnataka workplaces where context and relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Kannada
89.1%

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.

Kannada

Why Kannada is hard to understand

Four-way stop contrasts

  • Kannada consonant contrasts that change meaning look identical in fast meeting speech
  • Kannada has the full four-way voiced/voiceless × aspirated/unaspirated stop system. In the fast speech of a Bangalore tech meeting, pa/pha/ba/bha distinctions that completely change word meaning produce near-identical lip shapes. A deaf participant has no visual signal to resolve them — the distinction is purely acoustic.

Three places of articulation

  • Kannada dental, alveolar, and retroflex consonants all produce near-identical lip shapes
  • Kannada has three distinct places of articulation for stops and nasals: dental, alveolar, and retroflex. In fast professional speech, retroflexes reduce toward dental positions acoustically. Three phonemically distinct consonants at the same visual lip position is a fundamental lip-reading barrier that compounds in fast meeting speech.

Northern–Southern–Central dialect split

  • Three Kannada dialect groups bring different phonological patterns to national meetings
  • Kannada's three major dialect groups — Northern (Marathi/Telugu/Urdu-influenced), Southern (Tamil-influenced), and Central (standard Bangalore Kannada) — have distinct phonological patterns. A meeting with colleagues from Dharwad (North), Mysore (South), and Bangalore (Central) puts three different regional signals on the same call.

Bangalore tech English density

  • Bangalore meetings may be the densest English-Kannada code-switching of any Indian tech hub
  • Bangalore's IT sector has perhaps the densest English-Kannada code-switching of any Indian city. Meeting speech alternates languages at clause, phrase, and sometimes word level — English acronyms in Kannada syntax, Kannada words with English suffixes. For a deaf participant, the hybrid meeting register requires tracking two phonological systems simultaneously throughout every meeting.

Classical Kannada formal register

  • Formal Kannada presentations draw on classical vocabulary with different phonological expectations
  • Formal Kannada in presentations and official communications draws on Halegannada (Old Kannada) influenced vocabulary with phonological patterns distinct from modern spoken Kannada. A deaf person familiar with colloquial Bangalore Kannada encounters different phonological expectations in a formal presentation — and then the meeting shifts back to colloquial speech for the working discussion.

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The Challenge

63 million deaf and hard of hearing Indians — and Bangalore's world-class IT sector still has no meeting accessibility.

India has approximately 63 million people with disabling hearing loss. Karnataka, with its economy anchored in Bangalore — one of the world's largest technology employment centres — has a proportionally significant deaf and hard of hearing professional population navigating meeting-heavy careers. Nationally, the 2011 census found that of 13.4 million working-age hearing-disabled Indians, 73.9% were marginal workers and only 26.1% held stable formal employment. Bangalore's IT sector represents one of the few Indian environments where significant numbers of hearing-impaired people have reached formal professional roles — making the gap between professional opportunity and meeting accessibility especially visible.

The South India Disability Evidence (SIDE) study published in PMC, which included Karnataka's Bidar district, found that despite the legal framework of India's Persons with Disabilities Acts, access to formal employment for people with disabilities in South India remains severely constrained by communication barriers in professional settings. India has no national sign language standard — over 100 regional sign languages exist without a unified system — meaning professional interpreter provision in Karnataka's corporate sector is fragmented and practically unavailable for daily standup meetings, sprint reviews, or client calls.

A Karnataka study on hearing-impaired children learning Kannada found specific patterns of phonological difficulty linked to the language's deaffrication and stopping patterns — evidence that Kannada's phonological structure creates measurable additional challenges for people with hearing difficulty compared to some other languages. For the deaf and hard of hearing Kannada professionals navigating Bangalore's world-class tech companies, the absence of any meeting accessibility infrastructure represents a structural failure concentrated at the most visible point of India's knowledge economy. Captio AI captions Kannada in real time — including the four-way stop contrasts invisible on the lips, the dense Kannada-English code-switching of a Bangalore standup, and the Northern Karnataka-accented speech of a Dharwad colleague on a national call.

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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

"Bangalore tech standups mix Kannada and English every other sentence. Captio AI follows both languages and handles the dense code-switching accurately. I know what every sprint task means now without asking my team lead to slow down."

Vikram R. 🇮🇳
vikram.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Bangalore

"Fast Bangalore Kannada in a team meeting is impossible to lip-read — the four-way stop contrasts look identical. Captio AI gives me the full text in real time. Team meetings are accessible for the first time in my career."

Deepa N. 🇮🇳
deepa.n***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, pharmaceutical company, Bangalore

"Mysore Kannada has a Southern-influenced accent that sounds different from Bangalore standard. Captio AI handles the regional variety accurately. The production briefing and the head office video call are both accessible to me now."

Suresh P. 🇮🇳
suresh.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Mysore

"Northern Karnataka Kannada in a Hubli meeting sounds genuinely different from Bangalore and most tools flatten the distinction. Captio AI handles the Northern variety. The weekly team meeting is accessible and I no longer rely on the chat box alone."

Kavya H. 🇮🇳
kavya.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Hubli

"Bangalore tech standups mix Kannada and English every other sentence. Captio AI follows both languages and handles the dense code-switching accurately. I know what every sprint task means now without asking my team lead to slow down."

Vikram R. 🇮🇳
vikram.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Bangalore

"Fast Bangalore Kannada in a team meeting is impossible to lip-read — the four-way stop contrasts look identical. Captio AI gives me the full text in real time. Team meetings are accessible for the first time in my career."

Deepa N. 🇮🇳
deepa.n***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, pharmaceutical company, Bangalore

"Mysore Kannada has a Southern-influenced accent that sounds different from Bangalore standard. Captio AI handles the regional variety accurately. The production briefing and the head office video call are both accessible to me now."

Suresh P. 🇮🇳
suresh.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Mysore

"Northern Karnataka Kannada in a Hubli meeting sounds genuinely different from Bangalore and most tools flatten the distinction. Captio AI handles the Northern variety. The weekly team meeting is accessible and I no longer rely on the chat box alone."

Kavya H. 🇮🇳
kavya.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Hubli

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Kannada.

Captio AI is free to start

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