French live captions and productivity tool for phone & video calls
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow French phone & video calls
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing French 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 catch-up call with parents in Paris or a relative in Lyon. Family conversations carry fast casual French with regional accents and family shorthand. Captio AI captions everything said.
A team meeting run in French from a Paris office or a Zoom call with French colleagues. Business French with English technical terms. Captio AI keeps pace with both.
A callback from a médecin traitant or a pharmacy query in French. Medical calls use formal vocabulary at speed. Captio AI shows the full message — diagnosis, prescription, follow-up — in text.
A Société Générale automated IVR or a La Poste customer service call in French. Automated menus give you one chance. Captio AI captions each option before the timeout.
A call from Québec, Belgium, Switzerland, or Francophone Africa. French regional varieties differ substantially in phonology and rhythm. Captio AI handles all of them.
A WhatsApp video call with family in Marseille or a Teams meeting with a French team. All video call apps work the same way — put the call on speaker, open Captio AI, read the captions.
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 French is hard to understand
Nasal vowel invisibility
- Four nasal vowels look identical to their oral counterparts
- French has four nasal vowels (/ɑ̃/, /ɛ̃/, /ɔ̃/, /œ̃/) that are produced by lowering the soft palate with no outward lip change. Research with cochlear implant users shows significantly lower performance on nasal vowel identification tasks compared to hearing peers. On a phone call without hearing, words distinguished only by nasality — bon/beau, fin/fée, an/en — are indistinguishable visually.
Silent final consonants and liaison
- French word boundaries shift with what follows
- French drops most final consonants in normal speech, but reinstates them as liaisons before a following vowel: les amis (the friends) sounds les-z-amis. The phonological shape of a word shifts depending on what follows it. For a deaf caller reading lip shapes, a consonant that appears to belong to the wrong word creates constant boundary ambiguity throughout connected French speech.
No word stress
- Every syllable is equal — no rhythm cues for lip readers
- French is syllable-timed: all syllables are approximately equal length with no word-level stress. This removes the rhythmic cue that lip readers in stress-timed languages (English, German) rely on to predict word boundaries and identify content words. In French, there is no prosodic landmark to anchor lip reading.
Regional variety gap
- Québécois, Belgian, and African French differ substantially
- Belgian French, Québécois, Swiss French, and West African French differ in vowel length, nasal vowel realization, and prosodic rhythm from Parisian French. A deaf caller familiar with standard metropolitan French faces significant phonological mismatch on international calls from Montreal, Brussels, or Dakar.
Verlan and informal register
- Fast colloquial French reverses syllables
- Verlan (from l'envers — reverse) inverts syllables in common French words: l'envers becomes verlan, femme becomes meuf, l'arabe becomes rebeu. Widely used in casual phone calls among younger speakers, verlan creates phonological shapes that map to no recognizable standard French word for a deaf caller tracking the language's normal sound patterns.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreOne in four French adults lives with some form of hearing loss — and most cannot access real-time phone captions
A 2022 INSERM/CONSTANCES study found that 25% of French adults are affected by some form of hearing loss, with disabling hearing loss affecting around 4% of the adult population. Around 1,000 babies are born deaf in France each year. Among adults over 65, more than 65% have some degree of hearing loss — making age-related exclusion from telephone communication one of the largest disability access challenges in the country. Only 37% of French people with severe hearing loss wear a hearing aid.
France's 2005 disability law integrated deaf and hard of hearing students into mainstream schools, removing specialist DHH educational support from many institutions without providing adequately trained mainstream staff. A telephone relay service for deaf callers (the 114 emergency relay and dedicated captioning services) exists but requires prior registration and is not available inside WhatsApp, Teams, or standard VoIP apps. The gap between policy and daily access is sharpest for the many callers who receive unsolicited callbacks — clinic results, bank notifications, government services — with no way to caption the incoming call in real time.
Captio AI lets a deaf person in Bordeaux follow a médecin traitant's callback, navigate a Société Générale phone menu, or join a WhatsApp video call with a relative in Lyon — in real time, without relay registration, and without asking the other person to slow down or repeat.
[1]INSERM — One in four French adults thought to have some form of hearing loss
[2]PMC — CONSTANCES study: Prevalence of hearing loss and hearing aid use in France
[3]ASHA Journal — Nasal/oral vowel perception in French speakers with cochlear implants
[4]GBD 2019 — Hearing loss prevalence and years lived with disability (PMC)
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
"Médecin traitant callbacks are always short and fast and full of medical French. Before Captio AI I would call back and ask them to send a letter. Now I read the callback in real time and understand the full message."
"Belgian French has different nasal vowel realization from Parisian French — I was always adjusting on calls from colleagues in France. Captio AI reads both varieties accurately. Teams calls with Paris are readable now."
"French nasal vowels look identical on lips — bon and beau, fin and fée, and so on. On a phone call you lose them completely. Captio AI shows them correctly in text. Phone calls in French are finally accessible to me."
"Québécois French on a video call is fast and uses contractions and elisions that Parisian French doesn't. Captio AI reads it accurately. Family calls from cousins in Montréal are readable — I can follow the accent without asking them to switch to text."
"Médecin traitant callbacks are always short and fast and full of medical French. Before Captio AI I would call back and ask them to send a letter. Now I read the callback in real time and understand the full message."
"Belgian French has different nasal vowel realization from Parisian French — I was always adjusting on calls from colleagues in France. Captio AI reads both varieties accurately. Teams calls with Paris are readable now."
"French nasal vowels look identical on lips — bon and beau, fin and fée, and so on. On a phone call you lose them completely. Captio AI shows them correctly in text. Phone calls in French are finally accessible to me."
"Québécois French on a video call is fast and uses contractions and elisions that Parisian French doesn't. Captio AI reads it accurately. Family calls from cousins in Montréal are readable — I can follow the accent without asking them to switch to text."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Follow every call in French.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store