Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Tagalog live captions and productivity tool for phone & video calls

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

👨‍👩‍👧Calls with family and friends

A call with family in Manila, Cebu, or Davao where informal Filipino moves fast and mixes Tagalog, English, and local language in the same breath.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A work call or video meeting where Taglish is the natural register — half the sentence in Tagalog, half in English, all at full speed.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A callback from a Philippine General Hospital or clinic where a doctor delivers results and prescription instructions in formal Filipino.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A call to a BDO branch, PLDT helpline, or Meralco customer service where automated menus are in Filipino and agents switch to English mid-sentence.

🌍International calls

A call from family in the OFW diaspora in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, or Italy who mix Tagalog with the local language.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A Messenger or WhatsApp video call with family in the Philippines where connection quality varies by region and everyone talks at the same time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Tagalog
89.2%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

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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.

Tagalog

Why Tagalog is hard to understand

Phonemic glottal stop

  • The glottal stop distinguishes words but leaves no visual trace
  • Tagalog has a phonemic glottal stop that distinguishes many minimal pairs. The glottal stop is produced in the throat with no lip movement whatsoever. On a phone or video call, it is entirely invisible. A deaf caller reading lips sees the same vowel sequence for two words that a hearing caller distinguishes instantly.

Phonemic stress

  • Word stress is meaning-bearing but lives in the voice
  • Tagalog stress is phonemically distinctive — two otherwise identical words can differ only in stress position, changing their grammatical function. Stress is realized through pitch and duration in the voice. On a video call, a deaf caller sees the same mouth shapes for both words. The entire lexical stress system is auditory-only.

Taglish code-switching

  • Filipino phone calls pivot between Tagalog and English without warning
  • Filipino phone calls — especially among younger urban speakers in Metro Manila — switch between Tagalog and English within a single sentence. When the code switches, the phonological system resets: English vowels, consonant clusters, and prosody arrive without visual warning. A deaf caller tracking Tagalog lip shapes is suddenly reading English ones.

Regional language variation

  • Many callers speak Tagalog as a second language with first-language phonology
  • The Philippines has over 170 languages. Many callers use Tagalog as a second language, speaking it with the phonological patterns of Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, or Waray. On a phone call, the same Tagalog words arrive with different vowel qualities and consonant treatments depending on the caller's origin — without any visual cue for the deaf caller.

Affix segmentation

  • Long affixed words blur boundaries at phone call speed
  • Tagalog uses many prefixes and infixes that attach to roots, creating long concatenated words where syllable boundaries fall in non-obvious places. In fast phone speech, these boundaries blur further. A deaf caller parsing words from lip shapes encounters a continuous flow with ambiguous segmentation points.

Download for free

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The Challenge

Nine million Filipinos living with disabling hearing loss — and a healthcare system still catching up with the scale of need

Disabling hearing loss affects 8.8% of the population in the Philippines — at least 9 million people who require medical attention or rehabilitation. A national survey found that 15% of Filipinos have moderate or worse hearing loss, making hearing impairment one of the most prevalent conditions in the country. The burden is distributed across age groups: 7.5% in children, 14.7% in working-age adults between 18 and 65, and 49.1% in adults aged 65 and over. The Philippine Statistics Authority estimated 1,784,690 individuals had hearing difficulties in the 2020 census. The prevalence of severe to profound hearing loss is also comparatively higher in the Philippines than in high-income countries, partly linked to rates of middle ear disease and limited access to early intervention.

Survey findings on the scale of hearing loss in the Philippines were used to advocate for landmark policies including a Universal Newborn Hearing Screening Law and a government benefit package for children with hearing impairment. However, access to audiological rehabilitation remains uneven — services are concentrated in Metro Manila and major provincial cities, while rural and island communities face significant gaps. For the approximately 10 million Overseas Filipino Workers whose families depend on phone and video calls for daily communication, a deaf or hard-of-hearing family member navigating those calls without support faces a daily exclusion that is largely invisible to policymakers.

Captio AI captions every Tagalog call in real time — so a deaf family member in Manila, Cebu, or anywhere in the Filipino diaspora can follow a video call without asking the caller to slow down or switch to text.

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

"My family in Davao speaks Tagalog with a Visayan accent. The glottal stops and stress patterns sound completely different. Captio AI shows the actual words. I understand my cousins on video calls now."

Maria L. 🇵🇭
maria.l***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Manila

"Taglish work calls from Manila were impossible to follow — the code-switching happened mid-word sometimes. Captio AI follows both Tagalog and English in real time. I stopped pretending I caught everything."

Carlo R. 🇵🇭
carlo.r***@gmail.com
Severe high-frequency hearing loss, Cebu

"Meralco called about my account. The menu was in Filipino, the agent switched to English, then back. Captio AI showed all of it as it happened. I handled the call myself and sorted the billing issue."

Grace B. 🇵🇭
grace.b***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since birth, Davao

"I call home to Manila from Riyadh every week. Everyone talks at once and they mix Tagalog with Ilocano because some of my relatives are from the north. Captio AI captions both. I know what is happening at home."

Josephine M. 🇸🇦
josephine.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Riyadh (OFW)

"My family in Davao speaks Tagalog with a Visayan accent. The glottal stops and stress patterns sound completely different. Captio AI shows the actual words. I understand my cousins on video calls now."

Maria L. 🇵🇭
maria.l***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Manila

"Taglish work calls from Manila were impossible to follow — the code-switching happened mid-word sometimes. Captio AI follows both Tagalog and English in real time. I stopped pretending I caught everything."

Carlo R. 🇵🇭
carlo.r***@gmail.com
Severe high-frequency hearing loss, Cebu

"Meralco called about my account. The menu was in Filipino, the agent switched to English, then back. Captio AI showed all of it as it happened. I handled the call myself and sorted the billing issue."

Grace B. 🇵🇭
grace.b***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since birth, Davao

"I call home to Manila from Riyadh every week. Everyone talks at once and they mix Tagalog with Ilocano because some of my relatives are from the north. Captio AI captions both. I know what is happening at home."

Josephine M. 🇸🇦
josephine.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Riyadh (OFW)

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Tagalog.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store