Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Arabic live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes

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.

🍽️Dinner with friends

A family dinner at a Cairo restaurant or a mezze spread in Beirut — everyone talking fast in colloquial Arabic, animated and overlapping. Captio AI captions each speaker so a deaf diner can follow across the table.

💼Business lunches

A business lunch in Dubai or Riyadh — Gulf Arabic with professional vocabulary, where catching every detail matters. Captio AI keeps every exchange accessible without drawing attention to the accommodation.

Cafe catch-ups

A coffee catch-up at a Lebanese café or a tea house in Cairo — ambient background noise, two people across a small table. Captio AI follows whoever is speaking in real time.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Dining at an Arabic restaurant abroad or when ordering from waitstaff who speak accented English — or when travel companions speak a different language. Live Translator bridges the gap in real time.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

An Eid gathering, a wedding reception dinner, or a family celebration — many people, elevated noise, toasts and laughter. Captio AI makes the celebration followable from first course to last.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A date or one-on-one lunch where conversation matters — Lebanese or Egyptian Arabic across a small restaurant table. Captio AI lets you follow every exchange naturally.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Arabic
83.8%

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 table — however noisy the room

Follows the person across the table

Point the microphone toward the person speaking and Captio AI captions them through the background noise. You do not need to face them, watch their lips, or lean in.

Works through restaurant noise

Restaurant noise averages 80 dBA — well above comfortable conversation level. Captio AI is built for these real environments, not quiet controlled rooms.

Place it and forget it

Put the phone on the table between you and the other person, microphone facing them. You glance at it as needed. No adjusting between sentences, no managing the setup.

No asking for repeats during the meal

Every word appears in real time. If you missed something, the caption is there — you do not need to stop the conversation and ask anyone to say it again.

Any language

For restaurants abroad, multilingual dining companions, or waitstaff who speak a different language. Live Translator captions and translates in real time with no manual setup.

Discreet

A phone on a restaurant table is unremarkable. Captio AI runs quietly, the screen faces you, and most dining companions adapt naturally once they understand what it does.

Arabic

Why Arabic is hard to understand

Pharyngeal and laryngeal sounds

  • A whole consonant class produced in the throat
  • Arabic has a distinctive class of pharyngeal and laryngeal consonants — 'ayn (ع), ha (ح), and the emphatic pharyngealized series — produced deep in the throat with no visible lip or jaw movement. These sounds are phonemic (they change word meaning) and occur constantly in natural Arabic speech. At a restaurant table, they contribute nothing to lip-reading.

MSA vs colloquial dialect gap

  • Written and spoken Arabic are completely different
  • Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the written form; the spoken forms are Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, Moroccan Darija, and others — each structurally different from MSA. A deaf lip-reader trained on formal Arabic encounters a different vocabulary, different phonology, and different prosody when people speak Egyptian at a Cairo restaurant or Gulf Arabic at a Riyadh dinner.

Emphatic consonant series

  • Emphatic consonants alter surrounding vowels invisibly
  • Arabic emphatic consonants — /sˤ/, /dˤ/, /tˤ/, /ðˤ/ — are produced with pharyngeal constriction that darkens surrounding vowels. This pharyngealization is produced behind the lips and changes how the whole word sounds while contributing almost no additional visual information. Emphatic and plain minimal pairs look identical on the lips.

Fast social Arabic

  • Restaurant speech moves at its own pace
  • Colloquial Arabic in social dining settings — the Lebanese restaurant table, the Gulf majlis dinner, the Egyptian family shawarma run — is fast, animated, and full of idiomatic expressions absent from any formal Arabic training. The pace at a social meal is nothing like the deliberate Arabic a student practises.

Arabic-French/English code-switching

  • A second phonological system enters mid-meal
  • In Lebanon, Morocco, and among diaspora communities, Arabic-French code-switching is pervasive. In Gulf countries and Egypt, English terms appear in professional and urban dining contexts. For a deaf lip-reader, an unexpected French or English phrase mid-sentence disrupts the visual Arabic pattern without warning.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in the Arab world: the scale of daily exclusion

In the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region — which covers the Arab world and neighbouring countries — 78.1 million people experience hearing loss of any degree, with 22.1 million having disabling hearing loss, projected to reach 51.7 million by 2050. A 2025 systematic review of hearing healthcare in the region found persistent gaps in service accessibility, interpreter availability, and newborn screening coverage across most Arab countries. In Saudi Arabia alone, 1.4% of the population — approximately 289,000 people — had measured hearing impairment, yet the country has approximately one sign language interpreter for every 93,000 hearing-impaired people.

The social exclusion associated with hearing loss in Arabic-speaking countries is compounded by a dialect landscape where lip-reading MSA provides almost no help with spoken colloquial Arabic. Research on hearing loss and social dining published in 2024 found that people with hearing loss disengage from restaurant dining at significantly higher rates — and in the Arab world, where communal dining is one of the central social rituals, this exclusion carries particular weight. The shared table — the family iftar, the business lunch, the wedding reception — is where Arabic social life happens.

Captio AI captions Arabic conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow an iftar dinner in Riyadh, a mezze gathering in Beirut, or a family shawarma run in Cairo without missing a word.

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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

"Lebanese family dinners are the loudest events I know — mezze, everyone talking at once in fast Levantine Arabic, music in the background. Captio AI gives me the whole conversation and I actually enjoy meals now."

Layla H. 🇱🇧
layla.h***@gmail.com
Beirut, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"Business lunches in Gulf restaurants — formal Arabic mixed with English terms, fast and professional. Captio AI follows every exchange. I stopped missing the detail that matters most."

Omar A. 🇸🇦
omar.a***@gmail.com
Riyadh, deaf since childhood

"Egyptian colloquial Arabic at a Cairo restaurant is nothing like MSA. The throaty sounds, the speed, the dialect words. Captio AI handles Egyptian Arabic directly and the transcript is accurate."

Fatima K. 🇪🇬
fatima.k***@gmail.com
Cairo, bilateral hearing loss

"At Arabic restaurant gatherings in Paris the conversation switches between Arabic and French constantly. Captio AI follows both. I have not felt excluded at a meal in over a year."

Youssef M. 🇫🇷
youssef.m***@gmail.com
Paris diaspora, sensorineural hearing loss

"Lebanese family dinners are the loudest events I know — mezze, everyone talking at once in fast Levantine Arabic, music in the background. Captio AI gives me the whole conversation and I actually enjoy meals now."

Layla H. 🇱🇧
layla.h***@gmail.com
Beirut, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"Business lunches in Gulf restaurants — formal Arabic mixed with English terms, fast and professional. Captio AI follows every exchange. I stopped missing the detail that matters most."

Omar A. 🇸🇦
omar.a***@gmail.com
Riyadh, deaf since childhood

"Egyptian colloquial Arabic at a Cairo restaurant is nothing like MSA. The throaty sounds, the speed, the dialect words. Captio AI handles Egyptian Arabic directly and the transcript is accurate."

Fatima K. 🇪🇬
fatima.k***@gmail.com
Cairo, bilateral hearing loss

"At Arabic restaurant gatherings in Paris the conversation switches between Arabic and French constantly. Captio AI follows both. I have not felt excluded at a meal in over a year."

Youssef M. 🇫🇷
youssef.m***@gmail.com
Paris diaspora, sensorineural hearing loss

Download for free

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Arabic.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store