Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Telugu live captions and productivity tool for meetings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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 Hyderabad and Vizag offices where updates come in Telugu or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Google Meet, Teams, or Zoom calls with colleagues across Telangana 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. Important conversations where every word and instruction matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

All-hands meetings where company leadership addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Telugu, Hindi, and English — standard in Hyderabad's tech and corporate sector. Live Translator follows every language switch.

Informal catch-ups

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Telugu
91.8%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

Telugu

Why Telugu is hard to understand

Aspiration contrasts

  • Telugu aspiration contrasts that change meaning produce identical lip shapes
  • Telugu distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated consonants across voicing — pa/pha, ba/bha. In the fast speech of a Hyderabad tech meeting, these contrasts that change word meaning entirely produce near-identical mouth shapes. A deaf participant has no visual signal to tell them apart.

Andhra–Telangana dialect divide

  • Andhra and Telangana Telugu present different phonological systems in the same call
  • Telugu spoken in coastal Andhra Pradesh (Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam) differs phonologically from Telangana Telugu spoken in Hyderabad and Warangal. In a national company meeting, a deaf person calibrated to one variety misreads the other — and Hyderabad's tech sector brings both into the same call.

Retroflex inventory in fast speech

  • Telugu retroflex consonants disappear at the visual level in fast professional speech
  • Telugu has a large retroflex consonant set. In fast professional speech, retroflexes reduce toward dental or alveolar positions. The meaningful distinctions remain acoustically present but disappear at the visual level — making lip-reading Telugu in a meeting technically impossible for critical vocabulary.

Agglutinative verb complexity

  • Telugu verb suffix chains blur into a single rapid spoken unit in meetings
  • Telugu builds complex meaning through verb suffixes — tense, aspect, causation, and subject agreement are all expressed as suffix chains. In fast meeting speech, these suffix clusters articulate as a single rapid unit with no visible segmentation at the mouth.

Telugu–English code-switching in tech

  • Hyderabad tech meetings demand two active phonological systems at once
  • Hyderabad's technology and pharmaceutical sectors run meetings that freely switch between Telugu and English mid-sentence. For a deaf participant, tracking which language is active at any moment doubles the cognitive processing load of following the meeting.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

63 million deaf and hard of hearing Indians — and Hyderabad's meeting rooms are still inaccessible.

India has approximately 63 million people with disabling hearing loss. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — the two Telugu-speaking states — have a combined population of over 90 million, representing a proportionally significant share of India's deaf and hard of hearing community. The 2011 census showed that of 13.4 million hearing-disabled working-age Indians, 73.9% were classified as marginal workers, with only 26.1% in stable employment. For a region whose economy is anchored in Hyderabad's technology and pharmaceutical sectors — industries built on meetings, code reviews, and verbal collaboration — this represents a structural barrier at the centre of professional life.

The South India Disability Evidence (SIDE) study, published in PMC, found that despite the legal framework of the Persons with Disabilities Act and its 2016 successor, access to formal employment for people with disabilities in South India — including Andhra Pradesh — remains severely constrained. The study identified communication barriers as a primary driver of exclusion in formal workplaces. India has no single national sign language standard, with over 100 regional sign languages used across the country, making professional interpreter provision in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana fragmented and unreliable.

Hyderabad's tech sector has grown into one of the largest IT employment centres in Asia, with global companies running their Indian operations out of the city. This means more meetings, more video calls with international colleagues, and more verbal communication than any previous era of Telugu professional employment. Deaf and hard of hearing Telugu professionals are navigating this environment — an environment that combines the standard barriers of hearing loss in professional settings with a language that is genuinely difficult to lip-read, code-switches between Telugu and English constantly, and has no corporate captioning infrastructure. Captio AI captions Telugu in real time, so the daily standup, the sprint planning call, and the client presentation are all fully accessible.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Hyderabad tech meetings switch between Telugu and English every few sentences. Captio AI follows both languages accurately. I can participate in the code review and the sprint standup without asking my lead to slow down."

Suresh R. 🇮🇳
suresh.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Hyderabad

"Fast Telugu in a pharma meeting is impossible to lip-read — the aspirated consonant pairs look identical. Captio AI handles the phonology accurately. I know exactly what protocol changes were discussed in the briefing."

Lakshmi V. 🇮🇳
lakshmi.v***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, pharmaceutical company, Hyderabad

"Vijayawada Telugu sounds different from Hyderabad Telugu and most tools just collapse the distinction. Captio AI handles the Andhra variety accurately. Team calls with Hyderabad colleagues are now fully accessible to me."

Ravi P. 🇮🇳
ravi.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Vijayawada

"Telangana Telugu in a faculty meeting is fast and phonologically distinct from Andhra speech. Captio AI handles the regional variety. I can follow the academic discussion and the administrative decisions without a sign language interpreter."

Anitha M. 🇮🇳
anitha.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, education sector, Warangal

"Hyderabad tech meetings switch between Telugu and English every few sentences. Captio AI follows both languages accurately. I can participate in the code review and the sprint standup without asking my lead to slow down."

Suresh R. 🇮🇳
suresh.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Hyderabad

"Fast Telugu in a pharma meeting is impossible to lip-read — the aspirated consonant pairs look identical. Captio AI handles the phonology accurately. I know exactly what protocol changes were discussed in the briefing."

Lakshmi V. 🇮🇳
lakshmi.v***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, pharmaceutical company, Hyderabad

"Vijayawada Telugu sounds different from Hyderabad Telugu and most tools just collapse the distinction. Captio AI handles the Andhra variety accurately. Team calls with Hyderabad colleagues are now fully accessible to me."

Ravi P. 🇮🇳
ravi.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech startup, Vijayawada

"Telangana Telugu in a faculty meeting is fast and phonologically distinct from Andhra speech. Captio AI handles the regional variety. I can follow the academic discussion and the administrative decisions without a sign language interpreter."

Anitha M. 🇮🇳
anitha.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, education sector, Warangal

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Telugu.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store