Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Welsh 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

Daily cyfarfodydd tîm and stand-ups in Welsh offices where updates come in Welsh or English. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Teams or Zoom calls with colleagues across Wales or the UK. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Adolygiadau perfformiad and one-on-one sessions with a rheolwr. Important conversations in Welsh workplace culture where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Company-wide cyfarfodydd cyffredinol where management addresses all staff in Welsh or English. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Welsh and English — standard across Welsh public sector and bilingual organisations. Live Translator follows any switch in real time.

Informal catch-ups

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Welsh
85.7%

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.

Welsh

Why Welsh is hard to understand

Initial mutations

  • Word-initial consonants change grammatically — the same word sounds different each time
  • Welsh has a system of initial consonant mutations — soft mutation, nasal mutation, aspirate mutation — that change the first consonant of a word depending on grammatical context. In a meeting, the same word may appear as 'car', 'gar', 'char', or 'nghar' depending on syntax. A deaf attendee lip-reading the initial consonant gets a different signal every time, making word recognition from lip position alone unreliable.

Unique consonants

  • Welsh has sounds that exist in no other language most attendees know
  • Welsh uses /ɬ/ ('ll') — a voiceless lateral fricative — and /χ/ ('ch') that have no English equivalents. These sounds produce distinctive but unfamiliar lip and mouth shapes. In a Welsh business meeting where a term beginning with 'llan' or 'ch' appears, a lip-reader who has learned English phonology has no reference shape to map onto.

North–South dialect gap

  • North Welsh and South Welsh sound like different registers in a meeting
  • North Welsh (particularly Gwynedd) and South Welsh (Cardiff, Swansea) differ substantially in vowel quality, vocabulary, and prosody. In a Wales-wide video call, a deaf attendee calibrated to Cardiff Welsh may lose coherence when a Gwynedd speaker joins — vowels, rhythm, and some lexical items diverge.

Welsh–English code-switching

  • Welsh and English alternate mid-sentence in every professional meeting
  • Welsh-medium professional settings — government, education, public sector — routinely mix Welsh and English within the same sentence. A speaker may say a sentence in Welsh, insert an English technical term, and continue in Welsh. For a deaf attendee tracking Welsh phonology, each switch requires a full phonological recalibration.

Trilled /r/ and /rh/

  • Voiced and voiceless trilled r create minimal pairs invisible on the lips
  • Welsh distinguishes /r/ (voiced trill) from /rh/ (voiceless trill) — a contrast that carries semantic weight. This distinction is acoustically present but produces minimal visible difference at the lips. A deaf attendee relying on speechreading cannot recover the voiceless–voiced distinction for trilled /r/.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and Welsh-language meeting access

Approximately 610,000 people in Wales have deafness, hearing loss, or tinnitus, according to RNID and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. Wales has a higher proportion of people who are deafblind than any other home country in the UK. Across the UK, over 18 million adults are deaf, have hearing loss, or have tinnitus, and around 900,000 are severely or profoundly deaf. These figures establish the scale of the population for whom accessible meeting tools are not a convenience but a prerequisite for professional participation.

Welsh-language services for deaf and hard-of-hearing people exist but are structurally limited. Welsh Sign Language is used by some deaf people in Wales, but the majority of deaf Welsh speakers rely on spoken Welsh with captions or note-taking support. The Welsh Language Act and subsequent legislation require Welsh-language provision in public bodies — meaning Welsh-medium meetings are a legal requirement in many settings — but there is no parallel requirement for captioning or accessibility in those Welsh-language meetings, leaving a gap that affects any deaf employee in a Welsh-medium workplace.

The intersection of Welsh-language professional requirements and hearing loss creates a specific exclusion: a deaf employee in a Welsh local authority, Senedd office, or Welsh-medium school cannot simply switch to English captioning tools because the meeting is legally required to be in Welsh. For these employees, a Welsh-capable real-time captioning tool is the only viable access solution. Captio AI captions Welsh in real time — handling initial mutations, unique consonants, North–South dialect variation, and Welsh–English code-switching — so a deaf professional in a Caernarfon council meeting or a Cardiff Bay government briefing follows every word as it is spoken.

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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

"Our council meetings are conducted entirely in Welsh — there is no English option. Captio AI handles Welsh mutations and North Welsh phonology accurately. I follow every agenda item and vote without an interpreter."

Rhiannon J. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
rhiannon.j***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, local authority, Caernarfon

"Cardiff Bay meetings switch between Welsh and English constantly. Captio AI follows both languages and I catch every policy decision and action point without asking for a repeat."

Owain H. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
owain.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Welsh government, Cardiff

"Staff meetings are in Welsh. The 'll' and 'ch' sounds are completely invisible when lip-reading. Captio AI captures them from the audio signal and I follow every briefing and parent consultation accurately."

Siân M. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
sian.m***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Welsh-medium school, Swansea

"North Welsh from Gwynedd sounds very different from South Welsh. Captio AI handles both varieties and I follow every production meeting and editorial discussion without gaps."

Dafydd P. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
dafydd.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, media company, Bangor

"Our council meetings are conducted entirely in Welsh — there is no English option. Captio AI handles Welsh mutations and North Welsh phonology accurately. I follow every agenda item and vote without an interpreter."

Rhiannon J. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
rhiannon.j***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, local authority, Caernarfon

"Cardiff Bay meetings switch between Welsh and English constantly. Captio AI follows both languages and I catch every policy decision and action point without asking for a repeat."

Owain H. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
owain.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Welsh government, Cardiff

"Staff meetings are in Welsh. The 'll' and 'ch' sounds are completely invisible when lip-reading. Captio AI captures them from the audio signal and I follow every briefing and parent consultation accurately."

Siân M. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
sian.m***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Welsh-medium school, Swansea

"North Welsh from Gwynedd sounds very different from South Welsh. Captio AI handles both varieties and I follow every production meeting and editorial discussion without gaps."

Dafydd P. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
dafydd.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, media company, Bangor

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Welsh.

Captio AI is free to start

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