Dutch live captions and productivity tool for phone & video calls
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Dutch phone & video calls
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Dutch speakers.
Follow the call in real time
- Captions appear word by word as the other person speaks
- Works on any call — no app integration required
- Put the call on speaker and point the microphone toward it
- Handles compressed call audio accurately
International and foreign-language calls
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- Translates in real time as they speak
- 60+ languages, no setup
- For family abroad, international business, or travel
Transcribe any call recording
- Record the call and upload for a complete written transcript
- Review instructions, information, and decisions after
- Organised by speaker
- Works on any call recording
Key information extracted from any call
- Important points pulled from any call transcript
- Useful for medical calls, customer service, and work calls
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
A call with parents in Amsterdam or family in Eindhoven who speak fast and assume you caught the details. Captio AI captions each word as they speak so you follow the whole conversation without asking them to slow down or repeat.
A work call with colleagues in Rotterdam or a client call with Belgian counterparts in Ghent — where Flemish Dutch sounds distinctly different. Put the call on speaker, point Captio AI toward the audio, and follow every discussion point without losing the thread.
A callback from your huisarts (GP), the hospital, or the pharmacy — formal medical Dutch spoken quickly with clinical vocabulary. Captio AI captions the dosage, the appointment date, and every instruction in real time so nothing is missed.
A call from your bank (ING, Rabobank, ABN AMRO), the Belastingdienst (tax authority), or a utility company. Automated menus, long hold times, and fast-talking agents — Captio AI captions whatever comes through the speaker.
A call from family in Suriname, Curaçao, or the Netherlands Antilles, where Dutch is spoken with Caribbean phonological influence. Live Translator handles the language and regional variation so distance is never an additional barrier.
A video call on Teams, FaceTime, or WhatsApp — the daily tools for Dutch remote work and family catch-ups. Captio AI listens through the speaker and captions in real time alongside the video feed.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
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.
Why Dutch is hard to understand
Uvular R
- The guttural Dutch R leaves nothing on the lips
- The Dutch /r/ is typically a uvular fricative or approximant — produced at the back of the throat, like the French R, not the tongue-tip trill of Spanish. On a phone call, this sound arrives as a characteristic raspy quality in the audio; for a deaf or hard of hearing person, it is entirely invisible and leaves no distinguishing mark when lip reading is unavailable.
Final devoicing
- Word-final consonants swap their identity
- Dutch devoices all obstruents at the end of words: 'bad' (bath) is pronounced /bɑt/, not /bɑd/; 'hond' (dog) ends with /t/, not /d/. For a hard of hearing caller, this means the visual or acoustic cue you receive at the end of a word often indicates the wrong phoneme — 'bed' and 'bet' sound identical, as do dozens of other pairs.
Dialect gap
- Flemish Belgian Dutch sounds like a different register
- Standard Dutch (ABN) and Belgian Dutch (Flemish) differ substantially in vowel quality, prosody, and vocabulary. A call from Antwerp sounds different from Amsterdam, and regional dialects — Limburgish, Zeelandic, Gronings — add further variation. For a hard of hearing person who has calibrated to one variety, a caller from another region creates an entirely different comprehension challenge.
Vowel length
- Long and short vowels look identical on the lips
- Dutch distinguishes vowel length as a meaning distinction — 'man' (man) vs 'maan' (moon); 'bot' (bone) vs 'boot' (boat). Short and long vowels have nearly identical lip configurations, so on a phone call with poor audio quality, a hard of hearing person cannot distinguish them by any remaining visual or acoustic cue.
Cluster reduction
- Consonant clusters compress in fast colloquial speech
- Dutch has complex onset clusters like /str/, /schr/, /spr/, and /kn/. In fast casual phone conversation — the kind used with family or familiar colleagues — these clusters reduce significantly. 'Straat' (street) and 'schrift' (writing) compress to the point where even context is needed to recover the full consonant sequence.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreNearly 2 million people in the Netherlands live with hearing problems
A 2010 national health survey found that almost 2 million people in the Netherlands reported hearing problems — nearly 12 percent of the population at the time. Prevalence rises sharply with age: approximately 11 percent of people aged 65 to 74 have hearing impairment in general practice settings, rising to nearly 25 percent among those aged 75 and older. With an ageing population and the Netherlands' 17 million residents, the number of people experiencing significant hearing difficulty continues to grow.
A 2025 study examining employment outcomes of deaf and hard of hearing people in the Netherlands — using national microdata from Statistics Netherlands — found that those who claimed sensory disability care between 2015 and 2019 were significantly more likely to receive income from sick leave or disability pension, had lower average hourly wages, worked fewer hours per week, and were concentrated in different employment sectors compared to the general Dutch working population. People with a moderate hearing loss of 35 dB or more in their better ear qualify for sensory disability care, but access to that care and to adequate workplace accommodation remains inconsistent. Almost half of people who would benefit from a hearing aid in the Netherlands do not have one.
Captio AI captions every Dutch phone call in real time — so whether it is a callback from the huisarts in Amsterdam, a conference call with colleagues in Rotterdam, or a video call with family in Antwerp, the words appear on screen as they are spoken.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"Phone calls in Dutch are already hard — fast speech, final devoicing, everyone assuming you heard them. Captio AI changed that. I now actually follow what my GP says when she calls back, and I do not have to ask her to send it in writing."
"Belgian Dutch and Dutch Dutch already sound different. I work with colleagues in Amsterdam and follow up with clients in Antwerp. Captio AI handles both without me having to switch anything — it just captions whoever is speaking."
"Work Teams calls were the worst. People talk over each other, the audio compresses, I miss half of it. Now I put it on speaker with Captio AI running and follow the whole meeting. My colleagues stopped noticing I have hearing loss at all."
"The Belastingdienst called about my tax return and spoke so fast I understood almost nothing. I called back with Captio AI running and read every word they said. Never had that level of clarity on a government phone call before."
"Phone calls in Dutch are already hard — fast speech, final devoicing, everyone assuming you heard them. Captio AI changed that. I now actually follow what my GP says when she calls back, and I do not have to ask her to send it in writing."
"Belgian Dutch and Dutch Dutch already sound different. I work with colleagues in Amsterdam and follow up with clients in Antwerp. Captio AI handles both without me having to switch anything — it just captions whoever is speaking."
"Work Teams calls were the worst. People talk over each other, the audio compresses, I miss half of it. Now I put it on speaker with Captio AI running and follow the whole meeting. My colleagues stopped noticing I have hearing loss at all."
"The Belastingdienst called about my tax return and spoke so fast I understood almost nothing. I called back with Captio AI running and read every word they said. Never had that level of clarity on a government phone call before."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Follow every call in Dutch.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store