Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Danish 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 traditional Danish restaurant or smørrebrød café in Copenhagen or Aarhus, where the conversation moves fast over herring and rye bread and the background noise of a lively Danish evening fills the room.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Copenhagen's business districts where formal Danish mixes with English and following client detail across a busy lunch table matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a hyggeligt Danish coffee shop, where the clink of cups and nearby conversations compete with the person sitting across from you.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Denmark as a visitor, where Danish menus and server recommendations arrive in fast Copenhagen Danish or a regional Jutlandic accent that can sound quite different.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Danish restaurant — birthdays, julefrokost Christmas lunches, anniversaries — where multiple conversations happen at once and Danish Christmas music fills the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a canal-side Copenhagen restaurant or a cosy Aarhus dining room where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves over the ambient noise.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Danish
92.3%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

Danish

Why Danish is hard to understand

Stød — laryngeal phonation

  • A feature of the voice box with no visible lip movement
  • Danish has a unique suprasegmental feature called stød — a kind of creaky voice or glottal laryngealization that distinguishes word meaning. Minimal pairs are differentiated purely by this laryngeal feature, which is produced in the voice box with no visible movement on the lips or face whatsoever. At a Copenhagen restaurant table, stød appears constantly and provides zero lip-readable information.

Plosive lenition

  • Danish consonants are among the 'softest' in any language
  • Danish weakens its plosives (p, t, k) more dramatically than any neighboring Scandinavian language. Initial and medial consonants reduce to fricatives or approximants in fast speech, making Danish sound like a stream of connected vowels with very little consonantal structure. For a deaf diner watching lips, this means the consonant landmarks that help segment words in other languages simply are not there.

Schwa-heavy reduction

  • Far fewer sounds than the written form suggests
  • Unstressed syllables in Danish reduce to schwa and are often deleted entirely in casual speech. Danish speakers routinely articulate far fewer sounds than the orthography suggests — a gap that is wider than in virtually any other European language. At a Copenhagen restaurant, the spoken word often bears little resemblance to its written form.

Copenhagen-Jutland dialect divide

  • Standard Danish and Jutlandic sound very different
  • Standard Copenhagen Danish and Jutlandic dialects differ substantially in vowel quality and consonant realization. Jutlandic, spoken across the mainland peninsula, has different vowel systems and prosody. A deaf person accustomed to Copenhagen Danish may struggle to follow Jutlandic or Funen Danish at a mixed restaurant table.

Danish-English code-switching

  • English phrases arrive without warning
  • Among younger Danes and in business settings, English words and phrases appear constantly in Danish conversation. At a Copenhagen or Aarhus restaurant table, speakers shift between Danish and English without notice — confronting a deaf lip-reader with English phonology mid-conversation.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss in Denmark: 530,000 people and a significant treatment gap

A EuroTrak study found that 11.9% of the adult Danish population — approximately 530,000 people — self-report hearing loss. When hearing loss is measured rather than self-reported, the proportion rises to around 15-20% of adults. The age group with the highest share in 2016 was people over 74, with a prevalence of 33.9%. Despite this scale, nearly half of those with hearing loss do not use hearing aids: of the 47.8% who do, 91% receive some form of third-party reimbursement — evidence of a publicly funded system that nonetheless leaves around 275,000 hearing-impaired Danes without devices (hear-it.org).

People with hearing loss in Denmark report significantly more physical and mental health comorbidities than the general population — including higher rates of visual impairment, intellectual impairment, and mental health conditions (PubMed 28555382). The intersection of hearing loss with other conditions compounds social exclusion, making everyday settings like restaurants — which rely entirely on acoustic communication with no captioning or accessibility support — particularly challenging. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).

Captio AI captions Danish conversation in real time — at a Copenhagen smørrebrød restaurant, an Aarhus dinner, or a family julefrokost — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table without needing an interpreter.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Julefrokost dinner at a Copenhagen restaurant — everyone talking at once over aquavit and pickled herring. Captio AI followed the whole table. First Christmas lunch where I actually understood the family stories."

Sofie L. 🇩🇰
sofie.l***@gmail.com
København, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Aarhus where my client's Jutlandic accent was very different from Copenhagen Danish. Captio AI captured it accurately — I didn't miss anything important about the project."

Mikkel J. 🇩🇰
mikkel.j***@gmail.com
Aarhus, progressive hearing loss

"The stød feature in Danish is completely invisible on the lips — I never know which word is being said when pairs are involved. Captio AI handles it correctly every single time."

Emma H. 🇩🇰
emma.h***@gmail.com
Odense, moderate bilateral loss

"Danish sounds like vowels with almost no consonants at restaurant speed. I put my phone on the table and now I follow every word. Going out with friends is completely different."

Lars B. 🇩🇰
lars.b***@gmail.com
København, profound loss since birth

"Julefrokost dinner at a Copenhagen restaurant — everyone talking at once over aquavit and pickled herring. Captio AI followed the whole table. First Christmas lunch where I actually understood the family stories."

Sofie L. 🇩🇰
sofie.l***@gmail.com
København, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Aarhus where my client's Jutlandic accent was very different from Copenhagen Danish. Captio AI captured it accurately — I didn't miss anything important about the project."

Mikkel J. 🇩🇰
mikkel.j***@gmail.com
Aarhus, progressive hearing loss

"The stød feature in Danish is completely invisible on the lips — I never know which word is being said when pairs are involved. Captio AI handles it correctly every single time."

Emma H. 🇩🇰
emma.h***@gmail.com
Odense, moderate bilateral loss

"Danish sounds like vowels with almost no consonants at restaurant speed. I put my phone on the table and now I follow every word. Going out with friends is completely different."

Lars B. 🇩🇰
lars.b***@gmail.com
København, profound loss since birth

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Danish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store