Basque live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Basque restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Basque speakers.
Follow the conversation through the noise
- Captions the person across the table in real time
- Works through typical restaurant background noise
- Place the phone between you — no adjustment needed
- No lip reading, no facing the speaker
Restaurants abroad or with foreign speakers
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- For waitstaff, companions, or travel dining
- 60+ languages, no setup
- Translates in real time as they speak
Transcribe any recorded conversation
- Record and get the full conversation in writing
- Review anything you missed after the meal
- Organised by speaker
- Any language, any format
Key points from any conversation
- Important points extracted from any recording
- Useful for business lunches and important catch-ups
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
A pintxos crawl in San Sebastián's old town, moving between bars and catching conversation at each counter in rapid Basque and Spanish.
A business lunch at a Bilbao restaurant where colleagues speak formal Basque and Castilian interchangeably and the topic shifts quickly.
Coffee in a Donostia café where the barista greets regulars in Basque and takes your order in Spanish without pausing to shift register.
Ordering in a rural Navarrese restaurant where the menu is entirely in Basque and the server speaks a local dialect variety you don't recognise.
A celebration dinner with extended family, some speakers comfortable in Basque, others in Spanish, with children moving freely between both languages at the same table.
A quiet dinner for two at a Biarritz restaurant in the French Basque Country where French, Basque, and occasional Spanish cross in the same sentence.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
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Download on theApp Store
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.
Why Basque is hard to understand
Dialect divergence from Euskara Batua
- Standard and traditional dialects differ significantly
- Basque's eight traditional dialect groups differ substantially from the unified standard Euskara Batua introduced in 1968. A deaf speaker who learned standard Batua may encounter Vizcayan or Souletin speech at a pintxos bar and find phonological patterns unfamiliar enough to significantly reduce lip-reading accuracy.
Souletin sixth vowel
- An extra vowel that looks nothing like Spanish
- The Souletin dialect of the French Basque Country contains /y/ — like the French u — a vowel absent from Spanish and from other Basque dialects. For a deaf speaker trained on eastern or standard Basque, this rounded front vowel introduces a lip shape they may not recognise and attribute correctly in fast speech.
Basque-Spanish code-switching
- Euskara and Spanish shift without visual warning
- In Bilbao, San Sebastián, and most of the Spanish Basque Country, Basque and Spanish shift freely in everyday conversation. At a pintxos bar or restaurant table, the language of a sentence can change mid-utterance — requiring a deaf person to reset their phonological parsing without any visible cue.
Basque-French code-switching (Iparralde)
- French enters mid-sentence in the French Basque Country
- In the French Basque Country — Lapurdi, Nafarroa Beherea, Zuberoa — Basque and French mix in similar ways. A deaf Basque speaker in a Bayonne or Saint-Jean-de-Luz restaurant follows a bilingual phonological stream quite different from the Spanish-contact variety spoken in Donostia.
Fast pintxos-bar speech
- Orders and conversation compress at pace
- The pintxos bar is a fast, lively social environment where orders are rapid, conversation overlaps, and noise levels are high. In this setting Basque is spoken at speed with considerable vowel reduction and elision, compressing the visible articulatory signal that a deaf person relies on to parse the conversation.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in the Basque Country: between two states, one gap in provision
Spain-wide, approximately 5 million people live with hearing loss — one in ten of the population according to the most recent EuroTrak survey — and the Basque Autonomous Community is proportionally consistent with that national figure. Research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with hearing disabilities in Spain (PMC9859572) found that communication access and social participation were severely disrupted during periods of restriction, highlighting the fragility of the support systems that deaf and hard of hearing Spaniards depend on in daily life.
Basque-language education and service provision is well-developed within Spain's Basque Autonomous Community relative to some other minority-language regions, but Basque-medium deaf accessibility services — sign language interpretation in Euskara Zeinu Hizkuntza (EusZH), captioning in Basque — lag behind Spanish-medium provision. For deaf and hard of hearing Basques whose preferred language is Euskara, accessing services in their own language requires navigating a gap between language policy ambition and practical implementation on the ground.
Captio AI captions live Basque conversation in real time, making any pintxos bar or txoko dinner a conversation you join rather than one you watch from across the counter.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"The pintxos bar in Bilbao is the hardest acoustic environment I know — noise, fast Basque, Spanish mid-sentence, everyone talking at once. Captio AI handles the full mix and I follow the whole counter conversation now."
"Business lunches here mix Basque and Spanish and the code-switching happens faster than I can keep up with hearing aids alone. Captio AI gives me the full text and I respond to what was actually said."
"In Bayonne the restaurant conversation mixes Basque, French, and sometimes Spanish in the same sentence. Captio AI captions all three and I follow the whole txoko dinner without asking anyone to slow down."
"My family's txoko dinners are in Basque and I was beginning to feel left out as my hearing declined. Captio AI captions the Vizcayan dialect my cousins speak and the standard Basque my parents use — the first full evening I've followed in two years."
"The pintxos bar in Bilbao is the hardest acoustic environment I know — noise, fast Basque, Spanish mid-sentence, everyone talking at once. Captio AI handles the full mix and I follow the whole counter conversation now."
"Business lunches here mix Basque and Spanish and the code-switching happens faster than I can keep up with hearing aids alone. Captio AI gives me the full text and I respond to what was actually said."
"In Bayonne the restaurant conversation mixes Basque, French, and sometimes Spanish in the same sentence. Captio AI captions all three and I follow the whole txoko dinner without asking anyone to slow down."
"My family's txoko dinners are in Basque and I was beginning to feel left out as my hearing declined. Captio AI captions the Vizcayan dialect my cousins speak and the standard Basque my parents use — the first full evening I've followed in two years."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Basque.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store