Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Azerbaijani 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

Dinner with friends at a Baku chayxana or traditional restaurant, where the conversation moves fast between Azerbaijani and Russian and everyone talks across the table at once.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in downtown Baku where formal Azerbaijani mixes with Russian and English business terms, and following technical detail across a restaurant table matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at one of Baku's old-city tea houses, where the ambient noise of a busy café competes with the conversation you are trying to follow.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out when visiting Azerbaijan, where menus and server recommendations arrive in fast Azerbaijani and knowing what is in the dish matters.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a traditional Azerbaijani restaurant — weddings, engagements, Novruz gatherings — where music, toasts, and overlapping conversations fill the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a restaurant on Baku's seafront boulevard where the background music is loud and you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Azerbaijani
92.1%

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 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.

Azerbaijani

Why Azerbaijani is hard to understand

Uvular and velar fricatives

  • Back-of-throat sounds with no lip movement
  • Azerbaijani contains /x/ and /ɣ/ (velar fricatives) and /q/ (uvular stop) — sounds produced at the back of the throat with no visible lip movement whatsoever. In fast conversation at a Baku restaurant table, these deep fricatives appear in common words and collapse into silence for anyone relying on lip-reading.

Vowel harmony blur

  • Suffix vowels run together at speed
  • Azerbaijani vowel harmony means that suffixes alternate between front and back vowel forms, encoding grammatical meaning. At restaurant table speed, these vowel alternations blur into indistinguishable streams — the boundaries between words and their grammatical endings become hard to segment visually.

Northern-Southern dialect gap

  • Standard Baku Azerbaijani vs. Southern varieties
  • Standard Baku Azerbaijani (Northern) differs markedly from Southern Azerbaijani spoken in northwest Iran, which has a stronger Persian influence and different vowel qualities. A deaf diner at a mixed-background family table in Baku may face lip patterns shaped by a completely different dialect than the one they are accustomed to reading.

Azerbaijani-Russian switching

  • Russian phrases arrive without warning
  • In Baku restaurants, Russian loanwords and full Russian phrases appear constantly in conversation — a legacy of Soviet-era language contact. Deaf diners accustomed to Azerbaijani lip patterns suddenly face Russian consonant clusters (/str/, /vzd/, /khr/) that follow completely different phonological rules.

Final-syllable pitch accent

  • Meaning carried on the hardest syllable to see
  • Azerbaijani typically places stress and a pitch accent rise on the final syllable of a word. In fast conversational speech, these word-final syllables trail off and compress — the meaning-carrying end of each word is precisely the part that is hardest to catch at a restaurant table.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Azerbaijan: the gap between policy and daily life

Azerbaijan ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in January 2009, signalling a formal commitment to accessibility. Yet for deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens, the gap between legal framework and everyday reality remains wide. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people live with disabling hearing loss — a figure that, applied to Azerbaijan's roughly 10 million population, points to hundreds of thousands of people navigating daily communication without support.

In Azerbaijan, people with hearing impairment are classified under the third disability group — a designation that excludes them from state housing provisions and several social benefits available to other disability groups. Sign language interpretation is provided by the state at a rate insufficient for daily communication needs, leaving deaf citizens to manage professional, medical, and social interactions — including restaurants and public dining — without funded accessibility support.

Captio AI captions Azerbaijani conversation in real time — at a chayxana in Baku's old city, a restaurant on the Caspian seafront, or a family celebration — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table without needing an interpreter present.

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

"Family dinner at a Baku restaurant for Novruz — everyone switching between Azerbaijani and Russian mid-toast. Captio AI kept up with both. First celebration where I actually followed the speeches."

Aynur H. 🇦🇿
aynur.h***@gmail.com
Bakı, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss

"Business lunch in downtown Baku where my client kept switching between Azerbaijani and English. I used to guess at the context — now I follow every word of a negotiation."

Tural M. 🇦🇿
tural.m***@gmail.com
Bakı, progressive hearing loss

"At a traditional restaurant in Gəncə the dialect sounds different from Baku standard. Captio AI handled it without any issues — I was genuinely surprised at the accuracy."

Leyla K. 🇦🇿
leyla.k***@gmail.com
Gəncə, moderate bilateral loss

"The seafront boulevard restaurants in Baku are loud and fast. I put my phone on the table facing my friends and followed the whole conversation. It changes everything about going out."

Rauf N. 🇦🇿
rauf.n***@gmail.com
Bakı, profound loss since childhood

"Family dinner at a Baku restaurant for Novruz — everyone switching between Azerbaijani and Russian mid-toast. Captio AI kept up with both. First celebration where I actually followed the speeches."

Aynur H. 🇦🇿
aynur.h***@gmail.com
Bakı, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss

"Business lunch in downtown Baku where my client kept switching between Azerbaijani and English. I used to guess at the context — now I follow every word of a negotiation."

Tural M. 🇦🇿
tural.m***@gmail.com
Bakı, progressive hearing loss

"At a traditional restaurant in Gəncə the dialect sounds different from Baku standard. Captio AI handled it without any issues — I was genuinely surprised at the accuracy."

Leyla K. 🇦🇿
leyla.k***@gmail.com
Gəncə, moderate bilateral loss

"The seafront boulevard restaurants in Baku are loud and fast. I put my phone on the table facing my friends and followed the whole conversation. It changes everything about going out."

Rauf N. 🇦🇿
rauf.n***@gmail.com
Bakı, profound loss since childhood

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Azerbaijani.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store