Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Kazakh 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 командалық жиналыстар and stand-ups in Kazakhstani offices where updates come in Kazakh or Russian. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Zoom or Teams calls with colleagues locally or internationally. 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 басшы. Important conversations where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Company-wide жалпы жиналыс where management addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Kazakh, Russian, and English — common in Almaty and Astana's corporate sector. Live Translator follows any switch in real time.

Informal catch-ups

Шай break conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Kazakhstani workplaces where working relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Kazakh
91%

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.

Kazakh

Why Kazakh is hard to understand

Back uvular consonants

  • Kazakh's /q/, /ğ/, and /χ/ are produced deep in the throat — the meeting's phonological backbone is invisible on the lips
  • Kazakh has a full back consonant series including uvular /q/, uvular fricative /χ/, and voiced uvular /ğ/ that are produced at the back of the mouth with no lip, teeth, or front-tongue movement visible to a lip-reader. In a Nur-Sultan boardroom, a significant proportion of each sentence's consonants are acoustically prominent but visually absent.

Agglutinative suffix reduction

  • Kazakh's agglutinative suffixes — which carry all tense, case, and agreement — neutralize into invisible mid-positions at meeting pace
  • Kazakh words are built by stacking agglutinative suffixes, each harmonizing with the root's vowel. At meeting pace, these suffixes reduce and neutralize — the grammatical information that a hearing colleague follows acoustically disappears into a single mid-vowel position on the lips, removing all grammatical cues from the visual channel.

Kazakh–Russian code-switching

  • Professional Kazakh in major cities mixes Russian mid-sentence — entire clauses may be in Russian before returning to Kazakh
  • Kazakhstan is officially bilingual, and in Almaty and Nur-Sultan a professional meeting frequently contains sentences that begin in Kazakh and continue in Russian, or are delivered entirely in Russian by some participants. A deaf person lip-reading Kazakh who encounters Russian phonology mid-sentence faces a shift from one phonological system to another without any visual transition signal.

Southern vs Northern dialects

  • Southern Kazakh (Shymkent, Almaty region) and Northern Kazakh (Nur-Sultan) differ in consonant realisation
  • Southern Kazakh dialects retain /dʒ/ where Northern varieties have shifted to /ʒ/. In a meeting with participants from different regions of Kazakhstan, the same word may be pronounced with a visually distinct initial consonant depending on the speaker's region — creating systematic inconsistency for a deaf lip-reader.

Script transition gap

  • Kazakhstan's ongoing Cyrillic-to-Latin script shift means meeting documents appear in different scripts across generations of colleagues
  • Kazakhstan is transitioning from Cyrillic to a Latin-based script, with full completion expected by 2031. During this transition, meeting documents, presentation slides, and written notes may appear in different scripts depending on the author's generation or organisation — creating a disconnection between what a deaf attendee reads on screen and what they are attempting to lip-read from the speaker.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and workplace exclusion in Kazakhstan

Approximately 150,000 people are officially registered as having hearing impairments in Kazakhstan, though experts estimate the actual number may be as high as 250,000 — reflecting significant underdiagnosis in rural and underserved regions. A 2026 study published in Frontiers in Public Health described official statistical data on hearing loss in Kazakhstan as scarce, with no comprehensive population-based surveillance system in place. The highest prevalence of hearing loss is concentrated among adults aged 18 to 59 — the core working-age population — making this a direct workplace inclusion issue rather than primarily an issue of older age groups.

The state provides deaf Kazakh citizens with a sign language interpreter allowance, but limits this to 30 hours per year — described by disability advocates as catastrophically insufficient for a working professional who attends meetings regularly. Almost all deaf Kazakhstanis are assigned the third-tier disability classification, which excludes them from housing entitlements and additional state support. Employment non-competitiveness is documented in national disability reports, with communication barriers between deaf workers and hearing employers consistently identified as the primary barrier to professional advancement in a rapidly developing labour market.

Kazakhstan's energy, mining, and financial sectors have created substantial corporate employment growth, but workplace accessibility investment has not kept pace. Corporate Almaty and Nur-Sultan operate in heavily verbal meeting cultures, often bilingual in Kazakh and Russian, with no standardised captioning provision for deaf employees. The bilingual workplace — where decisions made in one language may be relayed only in the other — effectively doubles the communication gap for deaf professionals who lack real-time access to either language.

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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

"Nur-Sultan meetings switch between Kazakh and Russian mid-sentence and the lip shapes change completely. Captio AI captions both languages in real time. I follow every decision in the boardroom without relying on a colleague to relay what was said."

Aigerim N. 🇰🇿
aigerim.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, energy company, Nur-Sultan

"Almaty Kazakh has a different accent from standard and the back consonants are invisible on the lips. Captio AI handles the regional variety and I read the full briefing in real time. The team meeting is accessible for the first time in my career."

Daniyar S. 🇰🇿
daniyar.s***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, logistics company, Almaty

"State meetings in formal Kazakh move fast and I relied on written notes — but they were sometimes in Cyrillic and sometimes in Latin. Captio AI gives me the live text in real time regardless of script. I follow the full meeting now."

Zarina T. 🇰🇿
zarina.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, government agency, Nur-Sultan

"The startup standup is half Kazakh and half Russian and nobody slows down. Captio AI handles both languages and the fast pace. The morning meeting is completely readable for the first time."

Rustam K. 🇰🇿
rustam.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT startup, Almaty

"Nur-Sultan meetings switch between Kazakh and Russian mid-sentence and the lip shapes change completely. Captio AI captions both languages in real time. I follow every decision in the boardroom without relying on a colleague to relay what was said."

Aigerim N. 🇰🇿
aigerim.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, energy company, Nur-Sultan

"Almaty Kazakh has a different accent from standard and the back consonants are invisible on the lips. Captio AI handles the regional variety and I read the full briefing in real time. The team meeting is accessible for the first time in my career."

Daniyar S. 🇰🇿
daniyar.s***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, logistics company, Almaty

"State meetings in formal Kazakh move fast and I relied on written notes — but they were sometimes in Cyrillic and sometimes in Latin. Captio AI gives me the live text in real time regardless of script. I follow the full meeting now."

Zarina T. 🇰🇿
zarina.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, government agency, Nur-Sultan

"The startup standup is half Kazakh and half Russian and nobody slows down. Captio AI handles both languages and the fast pace. The morning meeting is completely readable for the first time."

Rustam K. 🇰🇿
rustam.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT startup, Almaty

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Kazakh.

Captio AI is free to start

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