Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Punjabi 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

Team meetings and stand-ups in Punjab offices where updates come in Punjabi, Hindi, or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Google Meet or Teams calls with colleagues locally 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 instruction matters. 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 Punjabi, Hindi, and English — common across Punjab's corporate and manufacturing sectors. Live Translator follows every switch.

Informal catch-ups

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Punjabi
90%

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.

Punjabi

Why Punjabi is hard to understand

Three-tone system

  • Punjabi is the only Indo-Aryan language with phonemic tones — invisible on the lips
  • Punjabi has three phonemic tones: low, mid, and high. In a meeting, tones distinguish words and grammatical function. For a deaf participant, these tonal distinctions are entirely acoustic — they leave no visible signal at the lips, making Punjabi meeting speech phonemically opaque at the visual level.

Four-way stop contrasts

  • Punjabi aspirated and unaspirated consonant pairs look identical in meeting speech
  • Punjabi has a four-way stop contrast: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced aspirated. In fast meeting speech, these contrasts that completely change word meaning produce near-identical lip shapes. A deaf participant has no visual signal to resolve them.

Indian vs Pakistani Punjabi

  • Indian Punjab and Pakistani Punjab Punjabi present different phonological systems
  • Punjabi spoken in Indian Punjab (typically in Gurmukhi) and Pakistani Punjabi (Shahmukhi) diverge in vocabulary, loanwords, and phonological patterns. In diaspora community meetings in the UK, Canada, or UAE, the two varieties may appear on the same call — a deaf participant calibrated to one encounters a different system from the other.

Doabi–Malwai–Majhi dialect variation

  • Three Punjabi dialect groups bring distinct phonological patterns to national meetings
  • The three major Punjabi dialect groups — Majhi (Amritsar/Lahore), Malwai (Ludhiana), and Doabi (Jalandhar) — have distinct phonological patterns. In a meeting with colleagues from different parts of Punjab, a deaf participant calibrated to one variety may misread another.

Punjabi–Hindi–English code-switching

  • Urban Punjabi office meetings layer three languages mid-sentence
  • Urban Punjabi office speech in Chandigarh, Delhi, and Mumbai layers Punjabi, Hindi, and English in the same sentence. In diaspora meetings in the UK or Canada, Punjabi-English code-switching is the standard professional register. For a deaf participant, simultaneously running three phonological systems exhausts processing capacity.

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The Challenge

Hundreds of thousands of deaf Punjabis in India and Pakistan — corporate meetings remain inaccessible.

Pakistan has over 300,000 people who are deaf, with 7–8 per 1,000 live births affected by hearing loss — a rate increasing annually. Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, accounts for 55.7% of the country's total disabled population. Despite employment quotas of 3% for Punjab's private sector and 5% for Sindh, actual implementation falls drastically short: in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a PMC study found only 0.67% of government employees were people with disabilities. A survey found that 72% of disabled Pakistanis cite inaccessibility — specifically barriers in education, training, and workplaces — as the primary obstacle to employment.

On the Indian side of Punjab, the same India-wide picture applies: 63 million people with disabling hearing loss, 73.9% classified as marginal workers per the 2011 census. Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) is not standardised across the country, and Indian Sign Language exists alongside 100+ regional variants without a national standard. For Punjabi-speaking deaf professionals in Chandigarh, Ludhiana, or Lahore, there is no corporate interpreter provision standard and no captioning framework for workplace meetings.

The large Punjabi diaspora — one of the most economically significant migrant communities in the UK, Canada, and the UAE — adds a further dimension. Punjabi-speaking deaf professionals in Birmingham, Toronto, or Dubai navigate meetings that mix Punjabi with English and sometimes Hindi, in environments where interpreter access for Punjabi is essentially unavailable. Captio AI captions Punjabi in real time — including the tonal distinctions that are invisible on the lips, the dialect variation across the Punjab diaspora, and the three-language code-switching of a Chandigarh startup 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

"Chandigarh tech meetings switch between Punjabi, Hindi, and English every few sentences. Captio AI follows all three languages accurately. I know what every project decision means now without asking my manager to repeat."

Gurpreet S. 🇮🇳
gurpreet.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Chandigarh

"Punjabi-English meetings in Birmingham have their own dialect mix that is unlike anything from Punjab itself. Captio AI handles the UK Punjabi-English variety accurately. Team calls are fully accessible to me now."

Harpreet K. 🇬🇧
harpreet.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, manufacturing, Birmingham

"Brampton Punjabi meetings mix Punjabi and English in a way that is unique to the Canadian community. Captio AI handles the code-switching accurately. I can follow the full meeting and the post-meeting conversation."

Navjot B. 🇨🇦
navjot.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, logistics company, Brampton

"Lahore office meetings use Pakistani Punjabi mixed with Urdu and English. Captio AI handles the language mixing accurately. The weekly team meeting is accessible to me for the first time."

Zara A. 🇵🇰
zara.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, textile company, Lahore

"Chandigarh tech meetings switch between Punjabi, Hindi, and English every few sentences. Captio AI follows all three languages accurately. I know what every project decision means now without asking my manager to repeat."

Gurpreet S. 🇮🇳
gurpreet.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Chandigarh

"Punjabi-English meetings in Birmingham have their own dialect mix that is unlike anything from Punjab itself. Captio AI handles the UK Punjabi-English variety accurately. Team calls are fully accessible to me now."

Harpreet K. 🇬🇧
harpreet.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, manufacturing, Birmingham

"Brampton Punjabi meetings mix Punjabi and English in a way that is unique to the Canadian community. Captio AI handles the code-switching accurately. I can follow the full meeting and the post-meeting conversation."

Navjot B. 🇨🇦
navjot.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, logistics company, Brampton

"Lahore office meetings use Pakistani Punjabi mixed with Urdu and English. Captio AI handles the language mixing accurately. The weekly team meeting is accessible to me for the first time."

Zara A. 🇵🇰
zara.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, textile company, Lahore

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Punjabi.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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