Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Vietnamese 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 catch-up call with parents or grandparents in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Family conversations carry six-tone Vietnamese at full speed. Captio AI captions everything said, as it is spoken.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A team meeting run in Vietnamese from a Ho Chi Minh City office or a Zoom call with Hanoi colleagues. Business Vietnamese with English technical terms. Captio AI keeps pace with both.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A callback from Bạch Mai Hospital in Hanoi or a prescription query from the local pharmacy. Medical Vietnamese uses formal register and clinical vocabulary. Captio AI shows the full message in text.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A Vietcombank automated IVR call or an MoMo customer service query in Vietnamese. Automated menus run at fixed speed with a timer. Captio AI captions each option before the timeout.

🌍International calls

A call from the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, Australia, or Czech Republic. Diaspora Vietnamese carries foreign-language influence on vocabulary and rhythm. Captio AI handles it accurately.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A Zalo video call with family in Đà Nẵng or a Google Meet with a Hanoi team. All video call apps work the same way — put the call on speaker, open Captio AI, read the captions.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Vietnamese
94.6%

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.

Vietnamese

Why Vietnamese is hard to understand

Six-tone invisibility

  • Every tonal distinction is encoded in pitch alone
  • Vietnamese has six lexical tones (flat, falling, rising, broken, dipping, heavy). Every tonal distinction is encoded entirely in voice pitch and phonation quality — none has any visible lip or face change. On a phone or video call without hearing, every pair of words that differ only by tone (ma/mà/má/mả/mã/mạ — six different meanings) is completely indistinguishable.

Unreleased final stops

  • Word-final stop consonants are silent and invisible
  • Vietnamese word-final stops (-p, -t, -c, -ch) are unreleased — the mouth closes but no burst follows. These final consonants are invisible on lips and inaudible on a phone call, meaning the difference between bat (to catch), bac (silver/uncle), and bap (corn) is both acoustically and visually absent simultaneously.

Northern vs. Southern tone mergers

  • Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City use different tone systems
  • Northern Vietnamese (Hanoi) maintains all six tones; Southern Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh City) merges the ngã (broken/undulating) and hỏi (dipping) tones into one. A deaf caller from the south listening to a northern relative faces an additional tonal mismatch — even if they could hear the pitch, the tonal categories don't fully map.

Register gap

  • Formal Vietnamese sounds completely different from casual speech
  • Northern Hanoi Vietnamese uses a more measured, higher-pitched speech pattern while southern informal speech is faster and more relaxed. Formal calls — government offices, hospitals, banks — use a distinct register with vocabulary and pronunciation patterns that may not match the everyday speech a deaf caller is used to tracking.

Creaky and breathy phonation

  • Two tones are encoded in voice quality, not pitch
  • Vietnamese tones nặng (heavy) and sắc (rising) are realized partly through voice quality — creaky voice and glottalized onset. These phonation differences are entirely acoustic and invisible on lips. On a phone call without hearing, even the non-pitch component of the tonal system is lost.

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The Challenge

Fourteen hundred deaf children born in Vietnam each year, and no real-time phone access for any of them

Vietnam's Ministry of Health estimates that 1,200 to 1,400 children are born with hearing impairments each year — one of the highest rates of congenital hearing loss in Southeast Asia. Hearing disability is prevalent across age groups, with older adults and populations exposed to occupational noise in manufacturing and agriculture at elevated risk. The 2019 GBD study identified hearing loss as the leading cause of years lived with disability globally, and Vietnam carries a significant share of this burden.

Vietnamese Sign Language (Ngôn ngữ ký hiệu Việt Nam) is used in deaf communities with regional variants — Hanoi VSL and Ho Chi Minh City VSL differ significantly enough that signers from the two cities sometimes struggle to understand each other. There is no national relay telephone service for deaf callers on Viettel, Vinaphone, or VoIP platforms. Schools for deaf students in Vietnam that rely on lip reading have documented that the tonal dimension of Vietnamese is effectively inaccessible through vision alone.

Captio AI gives a deaf person in Đà Nẵng the ability to follow a Bạch Mai Hospital callback, navigate a Vietcombank IVR menu in Vietnamese, or join a Zalo family video call from Ho Chi Minh City — reading all six tones accurately as captions, 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

"Six Vietnamese tones and a phone call — completely impossible for me before. Captio AI reads them all accurately. Calls from my clinic with test results are now something I can handle on my own."

Hương N. 🇻🇳
huong.n***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Hanoi

"Southern Vietnamese merges two of the tones that Hanoi Vietnamese keeps separate. When I call relatives in Hanoi I could never follow which tone they were using. Captio AI reads both varieties accurately — I can tell the words apart from the text."

Minh T. 🇻🇳
minh.t***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since childhood, Ho Chi Minh City

"Zalo video calls with my grandmother in Đà Nẵng — she speaks central Vietnamese with different vowel patterns and tones. Captio AI follows it accurately. First time I've understood a full call with her without my mother translating."

Linh P. 🇺🇸
linh.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, San Jose

"Vietcombank automated calls give you one reading of each option at normal speed with a timer. Captio AI shows each prompt before the timeout. I handle all my own banking now."

Quang V. 🇻🇳
quang.v***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Da Nang

"Six Vietnamese tones and a phone call — completely impossible for me before. Captio AI reads them all accurately. Calls from my clinic with test results are now something I can handle on my own."

Hương N. 🇻🇳
huong.n***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Hanoi

"Southern Vietnamese merges two of the tones that Hanoi Vietnamese keeps separate. When I call relatives in Hanoi I could never follow which tone they were using. Captio AI reads both varieties accurately — I can tell the words apart from the text."

Minh T. 🇻🇳
minh.t***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since childhood, Ho Chi Minh City

"Zalo video calls with my grandmother in Đà Nẵng — she speaks central Vietnamese with different vowel patterns and tones. Captio AI follows it accurately. First time I've understood a full call with her without my mother translating."

Linh P. 🇺🇸
linh.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, San Jose

"Vietcombank automated calls give you one reading of each option at normal speed with a timer. Captio AI shows each prompt before the timeout. I handle all my own banking now."

Quang V. 🇻🇳
quang.v***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Da Nang

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Vietnamese.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store