Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Malayalam 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 Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram offices where updates come in Malayalam or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every point.

📹Video calls

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

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Appraisal sessions and one-on-one meetings with a reporting manager. Important conversations where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

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

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Malayalam, English, and Hindi — common in Kerala's IT and service sectors. Live Translator follows every switch.

Informal catch-ups

Chaya break conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups after the meeting. The informal moments in Kerala workplaces where relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Malayalam
89.3%

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.

Malayalam

Why Malayalam is hard to understand

Largest consonant inventory in Dravidian

  • Malayalam's 53 consonants create more visually ambiguous pairs than any other Dravidian language
  • Malayalam has approximately 53 consonant phonemes — the largest inventory of any Dravidian language. It maintains distinct dental, alveolar, and retroflex positions for many consonant types. In a meeting, a deaf participant faces three phonemically distinct versions of similar-looking consonants that require acoustic resolution — the visual signal alone is fundamentally insufficient.

Vowel length contrasts

  • Malayalam vowel length distinctions that carry meaning collapse in fast meeting speech
  • Malayalam phonemically distinguishes short and long vowels for all five vowel qualities. In fast Kerala office speech, these length distinctions reduce under time pressure. The vowel quantity that carries lexical meaning collapses acoustically and disappears visually — a PMC study found that vowel combination significantly affects word recognition for Malayalam listeners with hearing loss.

Literary vs colloquial register gap

  • Formal Malayalam presentations and team discussions use two distinct phonological systems
  • Literary Malayalam (used in formal presentations and official contexts) sounds dramatically different from spoken colloquial Malayalam. In a meeting, a prepared presentation uses formal vocabulary and pronunciation; the working Q&A that follows drops to colloquial speech. A deaf participant calibrated to one register encounters a different phonological pattern in the other.

Kerala–Tamil code-switching

  • Southern Kerala meetings mix Malayalam and Tamil in professional speech
  • In Thiruvananthapuram and Thrissur, Malayalam and Tamil mix in corporate professional speech — particularly in cross-cultural teams. For a deaf participant, simultaneously tracking two South Indian languages with overlapping but distinct phonological systems requires two active calibration frames.

Kochi tech-sector English code-switching

  • Kochi's tech sector runs meetings with heavy English code-switching throughout
  • Kochi's rapidly growing software and tech sector runs meetings that mix Malayalam and English so densely that English technical vocabulary appears every few seconds. The Kochi tech variety is a distinct register from either formal office Malayalam or standard colloquial speech — and a deaf participant must track two phonological systems continuously throughout the meeting.

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The Challenge

63 million deaf and hard of hearing Indians — Kerala leads on identification but not on workplace access.

India has approximately 63 million people with disabling hearing loss. Kerala stands apart as a model state for disability identification — it is one of the few Indian states to have implemented compulsory newborn hearing screening, catching hearing loss at birth rather than after years of developmental delay. Despite this progressive identification policy, the pipeline from early identification to professional meeting accessibility in adulthood is broken: the same India-wide structural barriers apply to Kerala's deaf workforce, with 73.9% of hearing-disabled Indians classified as marginal workers and only 26.1% in stable formal employment.

A 2024 PMC study on vowel identification in Malayalam for individuals with hearing loss found that different vowel combinations significantly affect word recognition performance across varying degrees of hearing loss — the first empirical evidence that Malayalam's specific phonological structure creates measurable additional challenges for hearing-impaired listeners compared to other languages. This research confirms what deaf Malayalam speakers already know from daily professional experience: the language's large consonant inventory and vowel system are particularly demanding for people with any degree of hearing difficulty.

Kerala's tech sector in Kochi and software companies in Thiruvananthapuram and Thrissur represent some of the most meeting-intensive professional environments in South India. For deaf and hard of hearing Malayalam professionals entering these sectors — identified early by Kerala's model screening program, educated with ambitions for formal employment — the absence of any meeting accessibility infrastructure is a structural failure at exactly the point where the identification investment should pay off. Captio AI captions Malayalam in real time — including the 53-consonant phonological system, the formal-colloquial register shift of every Kerala meeting, and the Malayalam-English code-switching of a Kochi tech standup.

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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

"Kochi tech meetings switch between Malayalam and English so densely that keeping track of which language is active is exhausting. Captio AI follows both languages accurately. I participate in every sprint planning meeting now without asking anyone to slow down."

Arun N. 🇮🇳
arun.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Kochi

"Formal Malayalam in government meetings sounds completely different from the colloquial speech I use with colleagues. Captio AI handles both registers accurately. The weekly team briefing is accessible for the first time."

Lekha P. 🇮🇳
lekha.p***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, government, Thiruvananthapuram

"Thrissur Malayalam has a different rhythm from Kochi or Thiruvananthapuram speech and most tools collapse the regional variation. Captio AI handles the Thrissur variety accurately. Clinical team meetings are fully accessible to me now."

Thomas J. 🇮🇳
thomas.j***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, healthcare, Thrissur

"Northern Kerala Malayalam sounds different from Central Kerala and the meetings here mix Malayalam with English and sometimes Tamil. Captio AI handles the Malabar variety and the code-switching accurately."

Sreeja K. 🇮🇳
sreeja.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Kozhikode

"Kochi tech meetings switch between Malayalam and English so densely that keeping track of which language is active is exhausting. Captio AI follows both languages accurately. I participate in every sprint planning meeting now without asking anyone to slow down."

Arun N. 🇮🇳
arun.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Kochi

"Formal Malayalam in government meetings sounds completely different from the colloquial speech I use with colleagues. Captio AI handles both registers accurately. The weekly team briefing is accessible for the first time."

Lekha P. 🇮🇳
lekha.p***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, government, Thiruvananthapuram

"Thrissur Malayalam has a different rhythm from Kochi or Thiruvananthapuram speech and most tools collapse the regional variation. Captio AI handles the Thrissur variety accurately. Clinical team meetings are fully accessible to me now."

Thomas J. 🇮🇳
thomas.j***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, healthcare, Thrissur

"Northern Kerala Malayalam sounds different from Central Kerala and the meetings here mix Malayalam with English and sometimes Tamil. Captio AI handles the Malabar variety and the code-switching accurately."

Sreeja K. 🇮🇳
sreeja.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Kozhikode

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Malayalam.

Captio AI is free to start

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