Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Ukrainian 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 video call with family still in Ukraine — in Kyiv, Lviv, or Odesa — where fast informal Ukrainian flows through a sometimes unstable connection.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A work call with Ukrainian-speaking colleagues where surzhyk or regional accents from eastern Ukraine shape the speech.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A telemedicine call or callback from a doctor speaking formal medical Ukrainian.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A call to a utility provider or government helpline where Standard Ukrainian is used in automated menus but the agent speaks differently.

🌍International calls

A call from family members who have relocated to Germany, Poland, or the Czech Republic and mix Ukrainian with their new language.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A WhatsApp or Viber video call with family in Ukraine where connection quality fluctuates and family members speak simultaneously.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Ukrainian
91.5%

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.

Ukrainian

Why Ukrainian is hard to understand

Soft-hard consonant pairs

  • Palatalization changes meaning inside the mouth, not on the lips
  • Ukrainian phonemically contrasts hard and soft (palatalized) versions of most consonants. The palatalization is realized inside the mouth, not on the lips. On a video call, a deaf caller sees no visible difference between the two sets — but the word meaning can change entirely.

Ukrainian g-sound distinction

  • Two back-of-throat consonants that look identical on screen
  • Ukrainian uniquely contrasts a voiced velar fricative (the g in 'hora') with a velar stop (as in borrowed words) — a distinction that sets Ukrainian apart from Russian. Both are articulated at the back of the throat with the mouth open and the lips uninvolved. On a video call, they are visually identical — yet choosing the wrong one changes the word.

Four-dialect speed gap

  • Northern, southwestern, southeastern, and Transcarpathian Ukrainian all sound different
  • Ukrainian has four main dialect groups with distinct vowel systems and prosody. A video call between someone from Lviv (southwestern) and someone from Kharkiv (southeastern) involves different vowel timings and consonantal assimilation patterns — all without any visual cue for the deaf caller to signal the switch.

Vowel reduction in fast speech

  • Unstressed vowels narrow at conversational pace
  • In casual and fast Ukrainian, unstressed vowels reduce toward central realizations. On a video call in informal register, the mouth shapes for these reduced vowels narrow — a signal that helps hearing listeners track words through acoustic change but that a deaf caller reading lips cannot use.

Surzhyk code-switching

  • Ukrainian and Russian mix mid-sentence without visual warning
  • In many everyday contexts, particularly in eastern and central Ukraine, speakers move between Ukrainian and Russian (surzhyk) — mixing vocabularies and phonologies mid-sentence. A deaf caller learns one phonological system but must navigate two simultaneously, with no visual cue to signal when the switch happens.

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The Challenge

Two million Ukrainians with impaired hearing — and a war that made communication access a matter of survival

Before the full-scale invasion of February 2022, Ukraine had more than 2 million people living with impaired hearing, with approximately 31,000 experiencing complete hearing loss, according to World Health Organization estimates. These figures make Ukrainians with hearing loss one of the country's largest disability communities. The WHO's global hearing loss data places Eastern Europe among regions where hearing disability contributes disproportionately to years lived with disability relative to healthcare access — a pattern that played out visibly in Ukraine's underfunded audiology infrastructure.

The conflict compounded the everyday barriers facing deaf and hard-of-hearing Ukrainians in acute and urgent ways: many could not hear air-raid sirens and lacked independent warning systems to reach bomb shelters in time. The Ukrainian Society of the Deaf — a non-governmental organisation that has supported Ukrainians with impaired hearing since 1933 — worked to ensure that emergency updates, evacuation instructions, and displacement information reached deaf communities in Ukrainian Sign Language. This effort exposed how poorly public emergency infrastructure had historically accounted for hearing-impaired citizens, and how critical accessible communication is in crisis conditions.

Captio AI captions every Ukrainian call in real time — so a deaf person displaced abroad can follow a WhatsApp video call with family in Kyiv or Lviv, and a deaf person inside Ukraine can follow a telemedicine call or government helpline without needing an interpreter on the line.

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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 sister is in Lviv, I am in Warsaw now. We video call every few days on Viber. Connection drops, she speaks fast, the dialects are different. Captio AI shows her words as she says them. I feel close to her again."

Olena K. 🇺🇦
olena.k***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Kyiv

"Work calls with colleagues in eastern Ukraine were hard — their Ukrainian sounds very different from western Ukrainian and they mix in Russian. Captio AI handles the mix accurately. I stopped asking people to repeat."

Mykola H. 🇺🇦
mykola.h***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, Lviv

"The telemedicine doctor spoke quickly in formal Ukrainian with medical terms I do not know. Captio AI transcribed every word. I read back my diagnosis to her to confirm. She said she had never had a patient do that before."

Oksana S. 🇺🇦
oksana.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Odesa

"I call home to Ukraine every week. The connection is often poor and everyone speaks at the same time. Captio AI makes sense of it. I know what is happening with my family."

Darya P. 🇩🇪
darya.p***@gmail.com
Hearing aid user, displaced to Berlin

"My sister is in Lviv, I am in Warsaw now. We video call every few days on Viber. Connection drops, she speaks fast, the dialects are different. Captio AI shows her words as she says them. I feel close to her again."

Olena K. 🇺🇦
olena.k***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Kyiv

"Work calls with colleagues in eastern Ukraine were hard — their Ukrainian sounds very different from western Ukrainian and they mix in Russian. Captio AI handles the mix accurately. I stopped asking people to repeat."

Mykola H. 🇺🇦
mykola.h***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, Lviv

"The telemedicine doctor spoke quickly in formal Ukrainian with medical terms I do not know. Captio AI transcribed every word. I read back my diagnosis to her to confirm. She said she had never had a patient do that before."

Oksana S. 🇺🇦
oksana.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Odesa

"I call home to Ukraine every week. The connection is often poor and everyone speaks at the same time. Captio AI makes sense of it. I know what is happening with my family."

Darya P. 🇩🇪
darya.p***@gmail.com
Hearing aid user, displaced to Berlin

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Ukrainian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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