Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Ukrainian 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 командні зустрічі in Ukrainian offices where updates come in Ukrainian or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Zoom or Teams calls with colleagues in Ukraine 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 керівник. Important conversations where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Company-wide збори де керівництво addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Ukrainian and English — increasingly common in Ukraine's tech sector. Live Translator follows any switch in real time.

Informal catch-ups

Coffee break conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Ukrainian workplaces where context is built. Captio AI covers those too.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Ukrainian
91.5%

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.

Ukrainian

Why Ukrainian is hard to understand

Hard/soft palatalization pairs

  • Ukrainian's palatalization system creates meaning contrasts invisible on the lips
  • Ukrainian has a rich system of hard and soft (palatalized) consonant pairs where palatalization changes meaning but produces near-identical lip shapes. Ukrainian also has a third category of 'semi-soft' or half-palatalized consonants — allophonic variants that add a further layer of ambiguity. In a fast meeting, multiple distinct phonemes share the same visual lip pattern.

Ukrainian /ɦ/ vs expected /g/

  • Ukrainian uses a voiced glottal fricative where Russian-familiar ears expect a different consonant
  • Ukrainian uses a voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ where Russian uses the velar stop /g/. For a deaf person who previously navigated Russian-language working environments and is now in Ukrainian meetings, this systematic phonological shift creates consistent misreadings — the consonant at the same position in a word produces a different acoustic pattern from what they have learned to expect.

Surzhyk code-mixing

  • Surzhyk Ukrainian-Russian mixing creates a fluid phonological hybrid in meeting speech
  • Surzhyk, the Ukrainian-Russian mixed variety common in eastern and central Ukraine, creates fluid code-mixing in meeting speech where Ukrainian and Russian phonological patterns interleave mid-sentence. For a deaf participant, tracking which phonological system is currently active requires constant adjustment throughout the meeting.

Regional accent variation

  • Western, Central, and Eastern Ukrainian bring distinct phonological patterns to the same call
  • Western Ukrainian (Galician/Lviv), Central Ukrainian (Kyiv), and Eastern Ukrainian phonology differ in vowel quality and stress patterns. In a meeting with colleagues from different regions, a deaf participant calibrated to one regional variety may misread another — and the regional patterns often reflect which language environment participants were educated in.

Dense consonant clusters in formal speech

  • Ukrainian formal meeting vocabulary has consonant clusters that reduce unpredictably in fast speech
  • Ukrainian business meetings use formal vocabulary with consonant clusters — стр-, збр-, щ — that reduce in fast speech. The gap between the formal prepared language of a presentation and the fast collaborative discussion of a working team is large, and the two registers present different phonological patterns to a deaf participant.

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The Challenge

Ukraine's deaf community, and a growing population with blast-acquired hearing loss, face inaccessible workplaces.

Ukraine had approximately 2.7 million people registered as disabled before February 2022, with hearing impairment among the leading disability categories. The full-scale Russian invasion since February 2022 has created a distinct new category of hearing injury: acquired hearing loss from blast exposure, artillery fire, and explosive detonations. This population — concentrated among working-age adults who were previously hearing — is navigating the workplace without the prior experience of managing hearing loss in professional settings, without established sign language fluency, and without any captioning or accessibility infrastructure in most workplaces.

Ukrainian Sign Language (USL) is used by the pre-existing deaf community. However, the newly blast-injured population entering or returning to the workforce with acquired hearing loss has no USL fluency and no access to real-time captioning in Ukrainian-language meetings. The displacement caused by the war means that many Ukrainian deaf and hard of hearing professionals are navigating workplaces in Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, and elsewhere — in environments where Ukrainian-language support is especially limited.

Ukraine's tech sector — one of the largest in Eastern Europe before 2022, centred on Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv — has continued operating in wartime conditions, with many companies now operating from diaspora locations. For deaf and hard of hearing Ukrainian tech professionals, the daily standup, the sprint review, and the client call have become even more central to professional participation than before. Captio AI captions Ukrainian in real time — including the palatalization contrasts that distinguish Ukrainian phonology, the Surzhyk code-mixing of eastern Ukrainian workplaces, and the fast formal speech of a Kyiv tech presentation.

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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

"Kyiv tech meetings switch between formal Ukrainian and fast colloquial speech rapidly. Captio AI handles both registers accurately. I follow every sprint decision now without asking my team lead to type in the chat."

Oleksiy M. 🇺🇦
oleksiy.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech company, Kyiv

"Western Ukrainian speech has different vowels and a different rhythm from Kyiv standard. Captio AI handles the Galician phonology accurately. Remote calls with Kyiv colleagues are fully accessible now."

Iryna K. 🇺🇦
iryna.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, NGO, Lviv

"I moved to Warsaw in 2022 and my Polish employer holds Ukrainian-language team meetings for the Ukrainian team. Captio AI captions the Ukrainian accurately. I can participate in the working meeting without missing what was decided."

Mykola S. 🇵🇱
mykola.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Ukrainian refugee, Warsaw

"Our Berlin office holds calls in Ukrainian for the team. Captio AI handles the Ukrainian speech accurately even on video calls with compression artefacts. I know what every task assignment means now."

Natalia B. 🇩🇪
natalia.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Ukrainian displaced, Berlin

"Kyiv tech meetings switch between formal Ukrainian and fast colloquial speech rapidly. Captio AI handles both registers accurately. I follow every sprint decision now without asking my team lead to type in the chat."

Oleksiy M. 🇺🇦
oleksiy.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, tech company, Kyiv

"Western Ukrainian speech has different vowels and a different rhythm from Kyiv standard. Captio AI handles the Galician phonology accurately. Remote calls with Kyiv colleagues are fully accessible now."

Iryna K. 🇺🇦
iryna.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, NGO, Lviv

"I moved to Warsaw in 2022 and my Polish employer holds Ukrainian-language team meetings for the Ukrainian team. Captio AI captions the Ukrainian accurately. I can participate in the working meeting without missing what was decided."

Mykola S. 🇵🇱
mykola.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Ukrainian refugee, Warsaw

"Our Berlin office holds calls in Ukrainian for the team. Captio AI handles the Ukrainian speech accurately even on video calls with compression artefacts. I know what every task assignment means now."

Natalia B. 🇩🇪
natalia.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Ukrainian displaced, Berlin

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Ukrainian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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