Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Urdu 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

Ammi calling from Lahore, Khala from Karachi, family from another province. Urdu family calls mix dialects and switch between Urdu and English freely, at full natural speed.

💼Work calls and conference calls

Vendor negotiations, delivery updates, office check-ins. Pakistani business culture runs heavily on mobile voice calls — decisions happen fast in informal Urdu registers.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

Hospital appointment confirmation, pharmacy queries, CMH or Aga Khan helpline. Healthcare access in Pakistan begins with a phone call — missing a drug name or test result time on a call has direct consequences.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

HBL or MCB bank automated menus, KESC or K-Electric helplines, PTCL customer service. Urdu-language IVR systems speak at full speed and expect quick verbal or keypad responses.

🌍International calls

A WhatsApp call from family in the UK, UAE, or Saudi Arabia. Pakistani diaspora Urdu carries English influences and a different pace — accent shift on top of international call compression.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

WhatsApp calls are how Pakistani families stay connected across cities and continents. Even with video on, following a fast Lahori Urdu conversation with heavy English mixing is exhausting. Captions remove that effort.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Urdu
93.7%

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.

Urdu

Why Urdu is hard to understand

Aspiration contrast

  • Urdu's aspirated consonants collapse on a compressed call
  • Urdu has the same four-series stop system as Hindi: voiced and unvoiced, each in aspirated and unaspirated forms. Aspiration is entirely acoustic — invisible on the lips. Phone compression partially masks the aspiration burst, collapsing minimal pairs like /p/ vs /pʰ/ and /b/ vs /bʰ/ into near-identical signals.

Nasalized vowel contrast

  • Urdu's phonemic nasalized vowels fade on compressed audio
  • Urdu has phonemic nasalized vowels that contrast meaningfully with oral vowels. Nasalization is acoustic and completely non-visual. Phone compression reduces nasal quality, making nasalized/oral vowel pairs harder to distinguish — and nasalization carries grammatical information in several Urdu forms.

Regional accent range

  • Karachi, Lahore, Hyderabadi, and Indian Urdu all sound different
  • Karachi Urdu, Lahori Urdu, Hyderabadi Urdu (Pakistan), and Indian Urdu (Delhi, Lucknow) have different vowel systems, vocabulary choices, and prosodic patterns. On a phone call with an unfamiliar regional variety, a deaf caller faces a shifted phonological system with no visual grounding.

Code-switching density

  • Pakistani professional Urdu mixes English heavily mid-sentence
  • 'Meeting rakhein', 'please call back karain', 'appointment confirm ho gayi' — professional Urdu switches to English for work vocabulary, medical terms, and brand names. The shift between Urdu and English phonology mid-sentence creates unexpected sound patterns on an already compressed call.

Suffix reduction

  • Fast Urdu drops grammatical suffixes in natural speech
  • In fast natural Urdu speech, grammatical suffixes that mark tense, gender, and case are reduced or dropped. Words that are grammatically different can sound identical in rapid phone speech. For a deaf caller trying to reconstruct meaning from grammar, this suffix reduction removes a key signal.

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The Challenge

Ten million Pakistanis with hearing loss — without a phone relay in sight

Pakistan's Special Advisor on Social Protection estimated that 4.8% of the country's population — approximately 10 million people — is deaf or hard of hearing. A 2023 WHO Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal study found that hearing impairment among children is widespread and often identified late, largely due to the absence of neonatal hearing screening. The burden falls disproportionately on lower-income households, where hearing aid penetration is near zero and families have limited access to specialist care.

Pakistan has no national telephone relay service for deaf callers. There is no government-operated text telephone system, no captioned telephone provision, and no mandate requiring phone-based services to offer text alternatives. Perhaps most strikingly: Urdu speech audiometry materials — the basic tools used to assess how well a deaf person hears spoken Urdu — were not standardised until a 2025 study in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. For decades, audiologists in Pakistan used English test materials on Urdu-speaking patients, masking the true scale of communication difficulty.

Captio AI is built for those calls. Put a hospital appointment line, an HBL bank menu, or a WhatsApp call from family in Lahore on speaker, and read every word in real time.

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

"Hospital callbacks from Aga Khan in Karachi — fast Urdu with medical terms, always a different doctor. I missed the medication name every time. Now I put the call on speaker and read every instruction as it's given."

Ayesha N. 🇵🇰
ayesha.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Karachi

"Work calls between Lahore and Karachi — different Urdu accents, fast professional speech with English mixed in. I used to reconstruct from fragments. Captio AI gives me every word."

Omar S. 🇵🇰
omar.s***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Lahore

"Calling Nani in Lahore from Bradford was my weekly struggle. Fast Lahori Urdu on a WhatsApp call, international compression, everyone talking at once. Captio AI captions everything perfectly."

Sana R. 🇬🇧
sana.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bradford, UK

"The HBL bank automated menu is fast and gives you three seconds to respond. I used to hang up and go into the branch. Now I read every option from the caption and handle it on the phone."

Imran K. 🇵🇰
imran.k***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, Islamabad

"Hospital callbacks from Aga Khan in Karachi — fast Urdu with medical terms, always a different doctor. I missed the medication name every time. Now I put the call on speaker and read every instruction as it's given."

Ayesha N. 🇵🇰
ayesha.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Karachi

"Work calls between Lahore and Karachi — different Urdu accents, fast professional speech with English mixed in. I used to reconstruct from fragments. Captio AI gives me every word."

Omar S. 🇵🇰
omar.s***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Lahore

"Calling Nani in Lahore from Bradford was my weekly struggle. Fast Lahori Urdu on a WhatsApp call, international compression, everyone talking at once. Captio AI captions everything perfectly."

Sana R. 🇬🇧
sana.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bradford, UK

"The HBL bank automated menu is fast and gives you three seconds to respond. I used to hang up and go into the branch. Now I read every option from the caption and handle it on the phone."

Imran K. 🇵🇰
imran.k***@gmail.com
Severe hearing loss, Islamabad

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Urdu.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store