Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Arabic live captions and productivity tool for phone & video calls

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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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.

👨‍👩‍👧Calls with family and friends

A call from Amo in Cairo, a parent from Riyadh, cousins from Beirut. Every caller speaks their own dialect at full speed — no concessions to the listener on the other end.

💼Work calls and conference calls

Business calls in Gulf Arabic, client negotiations in Levantine, team check-ins in Egyptian. Arabic-medium professional culture runs heavily on phone in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

Hospital appointment lines, pharmacy queries, clinic callbacks, SEHA or MOH health line calls. In many Arab countries, medical access begins with a phone call in fast formal or regional Arabic.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

Saudi Telecom IVR menus, Emirates NBD automated banking, Egyptian utility helplines. Arabic automated systems speak at standard rate and expect prompt responses.

🌍International calls

A call from family in Morocco to relatives in the Gulf, a business call with a Levantine counterpart from an Egyptian office. The dialect gap on top of phone compression is the sharpest version of the Arabic call challenge.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

WhatsApp calls are the dominant Arabic communication channel. Even with video on, following fast colloquial Arabic on a compressed video stream is exhausting. Captions let you read while you watch.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Arabic
83.8%

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 calls you have been avoiding

Captions as they speak

Words appear on screen word by word while the other person is still talking. You read what they say at the same pace everyone else hears it — no delay, no reconstruction.

Works on any call app

Captio AI does not need to integrate with any platform. Put the call on speaker, point the microphone toward the audio, and read the captions. It works the same way for any app on any device.

No more asking for repeats

Every word is on screen as it is said. If you missed something, glance at the caption rather than interrupting the call — the full sentence is there.

Handles call audio accurately

Compressed phone audio is less clean than in-person speech. Captio AI is built for real-world audio conditions, including the reduced quality of standard phone and VoIP calls.

Any language

For calls with family abroad, international colleagues, or foreign-language customer service. Live Translator captions and translates in real time with no manual setup.

Record and review after

Record any call and upload it to Audio Transcription. Get a full written record of everything said — useful for medical instructions, work decisions, and anything worth having in writing.

Arabic

Why Arabic is hard to understand

Pharyngeal and uvular sounds

  • Arabic has consonants produced entirely in the throat
  • Arabic pharyngeals (/ħ/ and /ʕ/) and the uvular /q/ are articulated deep in the throat — no lip movement is involved. On a phone call, these sounds produce no visual signal and their acoustic character is affected by narrowband compression. A deaf caller who might partly track lip movements in person has zero cue on a call.

MSA versus dialect gap

  • The language on family calls is not the language of formal study
  • Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and used in media. Family calls happen in Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, or Moroccan Darija — varieties with different phoneme inventories, vocabularies, and speaking rates. The variety a deaf caller has practised may be nothing like the dialect on the other end of the phone.

Emphatic consonants

  • Pharyngealized consonants change vowel quality, not lip shape
  • Arabic emphatic consonants (/sˤ/, /dˤ/, /tˤ/, /ðˤ/) contrast with plain consonants in minimal pairs. The acoustic difference is in vowel colouring — not in visible articulation. Phone compression can reduce this vowel quality difference, making emphatic/plain minimal pairs hard to distinguish even with some residual hearing.

Dialect-specific mergers

  • Each dialect collapses different phoneme distinctions
  • Gulf Arabic realises /q/ as /g/; Moroccan Darija merges Standard Arabic vowels and adds Berber substrate phonology; Levantine Arabic drops final case vowels. A deaf caller calibrated by residual hearing to one dialect faces a different phonological system on a call from a different region.

Fast colloquial speed

  • Casual Arabic moves faster than broadcast speech
  • Colloquial Arabic on a family call runs considerably faster than formal news speech. Vowels reduce, unstressed syllables drop, and words contract into forms that look and sound nothing like their formal counterparts. On a compressed phone call, this rate and reduction is compounded.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss across the Arab region — undercounted and underserved

Hearing loss rates across Arab countries are elevated by high rates of consanguineous marriage, which increases genetic risk for congenital deafness. A study examining 22 Arab majority countries published in Otology and Neurotology found hearing loss to be a significant genetic burden across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Levant. In Saudi Arabia, a 2024 study found 1.4% of nationals reported a hearing impairment — approximately 290,000 people — while functional hearing difficulty affected 7.1%. In Egypt, an estimated 7% of the population has disabling hearing loss, placing the total above 7 million.

Phone accessibility infrastructure across the Arab world is largely absent. There is no pan-Arab telephone relay service. Most countries in the region have no text telephone equivalent, no captioned telephone service, and no government mandate requiring phone-based services to offer text alternatives. A deaf Egyptian who needs to book a clinic appointment, a hard of hearing Saudi responding to a bank security call, or a Jordanian with hearing loss navigating a government helpline all face the same barrier: a phone-only system with no fallback.

Captio AI is built for those calls. Put a hospital appointment line in Riyadh, a work call in Dubai, or a WhatsApp call from family in Cairo on speaker, and read every word in real time — whatever the dialect, whatever the speed.

Download for free

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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

"Egyptian phone calls are fast and informal — nobody speaks MSA on the phone. I missed most of what was said and had to call back twice to confirm. Now I read every word in real time and I've stopped calling people back to check."

Nour A. 🇪🇬
nour.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Cairo

"Bank security calls in Gulf Arabic — the agent speaks fast, the line has background noise, and I have seconds to respond. Captio AI gives me every word. I've stopped avoiding those calls."

Khalid M. 🇸🇦
khalid.m***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Riyadh

"WhatsApp calls with my family in the Gulf — Gulf Arabic on one end, Levantine on the other, all at speed. Captio AI handles both dialects and I follow the whole conversation."

Rania H. 🇱🇧
rania.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, Beirut

"Work video calls in Arabic with colleagues from different Arab countries — different dialects, fast formal speech. I read the captions and participate in real time instead of nodding along and reconstructing the call from email summaries."

Fatima A. 🇦🇪
fatima.a***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, Dubai

"Egyptian phone calls are fast and informal — nobody speaks MSA on the phone. I missed most of what was said and had to call back twice to confirm. Now I read every word in real time and I've stopped calling people back to check."

Nour A. 🇪🇬
nour.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Cairo

"Bank security calls in Gulf Arabic — the agent speaks fast, the line has background noise, and I have seconds to respond. Captio AI gives me every word. I've stopped avoiding those calls."

Khalid M. 🇸🇦
khalid.m***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Riyadh

"WhatsApp calls with my family in the Gulf — Gulf Arabic on one end, Levantine on the other, all at speed. Captio AI handles both dialects and I follow the whole conversation."

Rania H. 🇱🇧
rania.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, Beirut

"Work video calls in Arabic with colleagues from different Arab countries — different dialects, fast formal speech. I read the captions and participate in real time instead of nodding along and reconstructing the call from email summaries."

Fatima A. 🇦🇪
fatima.a***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, Dubai

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Arabic.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store