Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Korean live captions and productivity tool for meetings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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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 팀 회의 in Korean offices where updates come quickly in formal Korean. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item on the agenda.

📹Video calls

Zoom or Teams calls with colleagues domestically or with overseas partners. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

면담 and one-on-one reviews with a 상사. Important conversations in Korean corporate culture where hierarchy and precise wording matter. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

전체 회의 and company town halls where 대표님 addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings with international teams where Korean and English switch — standard in Korean multinationals. Live Translator follows every switch in real time.

Informal catch-ups

Coffee machine conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups after the meeting. The informal moments in Korean offices where context and working relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Korean
95.7%

character 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.

Korean

Why Korean is hard to understand

Three-way stop contrast

  • Korean plain, tense, and aspirated stops all look identical on the lips
  • Korean distinguishes plain, tense, and aspirated stops — b/pp/p, d/tt/t, g/kk/k. All three produce similar lip shapes. In a meeting, 'dal' (moon), 'ttal' (daughter), and 'tal' (mask) look identical on the lips, and the distinction is carried entirely by articulation features that are invisible without sound.

Consonant assimilation at word boundaries

  • Korean spoken form differs systematically from written form at every word boundary
  • Korean applies extensive consonant changes at word and morpheme boundaries — '국물' is spoken as 'gungmul', not 'gukmul'. The spoken form of Korean systematically differs from the written form. A deaf participant reading Korean text alongside a speaker finds the two don't match at key boundaries.

Honorific register speed

  • Korean honorific suffix chains run together in fast formal meeting speech
  • Korean business meetings use formal -시- and -습니다 endings throughout. In fast formal meetings, the additional syllables of honorific forms run together, and the gap between the verb stem and its courtesy suffix chain blurs. A deaf participant trying to parse Korean honorifics in real-time speech faces both phonological and grammatical complexity simultaneously.

Seoul vs Busan pitch accent

  • Seoul and Busan Korean apply different pitch accent systems to the same words
  • While Seoul Korean has homogenized much of South Korea through media, meeting participants from Busan and the Gyeongsang region still bring a distinct pitch accent system. Busan Korean distinguishes high and low pitch patterns for the same word differently from Seoul — for a deaf person calibrated to Seoul phonology, a Busan colleague sounds markedly different.

English loanword density

  • Konglish loanwords in Korean meetings sound different from their English source
  • Korean business meetings use heavy English loanword vocabulary — product names, technical terms, job titles — phonologically adapted to Korean. The same word can sound markedly different from its English source, creating a communication challenge for deaf participants who know the English original but not the Korean phonological adaptation.

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The Challenge

33.4% employment rate for deaf Koreans — one of the lowest in the OECD.

In South Korea, the employment rate for deaf and hard of hearing people was 33.4% in 2017, compared to a general employment rate of approximately 67% — a gap of more than 33 percentage points. Research published in PMC in 2021 found that social support is the strongest single predictor of career satisfaction and labour market engagement for Korean workers with hearing loss. Without structured communication access in daily meetings, deaf employees disengage from collaborative work and professional visibility, concentrating their underrepresentation in formal employment. South Korea's meeting-heavy corporate culture — where daily standups, cross-functional meetings, and hierarchical reporting define career trajectory — makes verbal communication access a prerequisite for professional advancement.

Korean Sign Language (KSL) received legal recognition in 2016 through the Korean Sign Language Act. However, professional interpreter provision for corporate meetings remains in early development. Most Korean companies have no established process for providing KSL interpretation in daily meetings, standup calls, or client presentations. The Employment Promotion Act for Persons with Disabilities requires larger employers to maintain a disability employment quota, but the quota applies across all disability categories and does not mandate specific communication access for deaf employees in meeting environments.

South Korea's economy has shifted rapidly toward knowledge work, with Seoul's tech, finance, and entertainment industries built on high-frequency verbal collaboration. Deaf and hard of hearing Korean professionals entering these sectors face a structural communication gap that is concentrated in exactly the daily meetings, one-on-ones, and cross-team calls that determine career advancement. Captio AI captions Korean meeting speech in real time — handling the three-way stop contrasts, the honorific register of a formal presentation, the Seoul-Busan accent mix of a national video call, and the English loanword density of a tech standup — so no meeting leaves a deaf Korean professional behind.

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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

"Korean tech standups use formal honorifics with heavy English loanwords mixed in. Captio AI handles both the Korean grammar and the loanword vocabulary accurately. I follow every sprint task assignment without asking anyone to repeat."

Jisoo P. 🇰🇷
jisoo.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Seoul

"The three-way stop contrast in Korean makes lip-reading impossible in a meeting room. Captio AI gives me the text in real time. Board meetings are fully accessible for the first time in my career."

Minjun L. 🇰🇷
minjun.l***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, finance sector, Seoul

"Busan accent is genuinely different from Seoul and most tools handle it badly. Captio AI handles the Gyeongsang phonology accurately. The factory floor meeting and the head office video call are both accessible now."

Hyein C. 🇰🇷
hyein.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Busan

"Korean startup meetings go formal Korean, English, and back again within a single sentence. Captio AI follows all of it. I know what every product decision was without needing the meeting notes translated for me afterwards."

Sungho K. 🇰🇷
sungho.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Seoul

"Korean tech standups use formal honorifics with heavy English loanwords mixed in. Captio AI handles both the Korean grammar and the loanword vocabulary accurately. I follow every sprint task assignment without asking anyone to repeat."

Jisoo P. 🇰🇷
jisoo.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Seoul

"The three-way stop contrast in Korean makes lip-reading impossible in a meeting room. Captio AI gives me the text in real time. Board meetings are fully accessible for the first time in my career."

Minjun L. 🇰🇷
minjun.l***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, finance sector, Seoul

"Busan accent is genuinely different from Seoul and most tools handle it badly. Captio AI handles the Gyeongsang phonology accurately. The factory floor meeting and the head office video call are both accessible now."

Hyein C. 🇰🇷
hyein.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Busan

"Korean startup meetings go formal Korean, English, and back again within a single sentence. Captio AI follows all of it. I know what every product decision was without needing the meeting notes translated for me afterwards."

Sungho K. 🇰🇷
sungho.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Seoul

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Korean.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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