Finnish 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 Finnish restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Finnish 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.
Dinner with friends at a traditional Finnish ravintola in Helsinki or Tampere, where the conversation flows quietly but meaningfully over salmiak and reindeer, and the ambient noise of a full restaurant makes lip-reading challenging.
Business lunches in Helsinki's business districts where formal Finnish mixes with English and following client detail across a restaurant table matters.
Café catch-ups at a Helsinki kahvila or Finnish bakery café, where the clink of cups and nearby conversations compete with the person sitting across from you.
Eating out in Finland as a visitor, where Finnish menus and server recommendations arrive in a language with no close European relatives and unfamiliar phonology.
Family celebrations at a Finnish restaurant — midsummer dinners, Christmas gatherings, confirmation celebrations — where multiple conversations happen at once and the warmth of a Finnish family table fills the room.
Dates at a Helsinki harbour-side restaurant or a Tampere lakeside venue where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.
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 Finnish is hard to understand
Consonant and vowel quantity
- Single vs. double length changes meaning — invisibly
- Finnish is a full quantity language: both consonant and vowel duration are contrastive and change word meaning. Tuli (came), tuuli (wind), and tulli (customs) differ only in vowel and consonant length — distinctions that are entirely acoustic with nothing visible on the lips. At a Finnish restaurant table, these minimal pairs appear constantly and cannot be distinguished visually.
Vowel harmony in long agglutinative words
- Finnish builds long words where only the beginning is stressed
- Finnish uses vowel harmony — suffixes alternate between front and back vowel forms — and is highly agglutinative, building long words from roots and multiple suffixes. Finnish also always stresses the first syllable. This means long Finnish words spoken at restaurant pace carry clear stress only at the start, while the grammatically important suffix vowels that follow are unstressed and compress.
Consonant gradation
- Consonants alternate between strong and weak forms by grammatical context
- Finnish has a process called consonant gradation: strong consonants in certain positions alternate with weaker forms across word paradigms. /kk/ becomes /k/, /tt/ becomes /t/, and so on. In natural restaurant conversation, these alternations mean that the same root word arrives with different consonant shapes depending on its grammatical form — creating inconsistent lip patterns.
Eastern-Western dialect divide
- Savonian sounds different from Tampere or Helsinki
- Eastern Finnish (Savonian, South-Eastern) and Western Finnish differ in vowel quality, consonant realization, and the speed of delivery. Eastern dialects have distinctive vowel lengthening and diphthongization not found in western varieties. A deaf person accustomed to Helsinki Finnish faces a genuinely different phonological landscape at a restaurant in Tampere or Joensuu.
Finnish-Swedish code-switching
- Swedish arrives without warning in bilingual settings
- In Helsinki and coastal Finland, Swedish appears in conversations with Finland-Swedish speakers and in bilingual service environments. A deaf Finnish speaker at a mixed restaurant table in the Helsinki archipelago or Turku may encounter Swedish phonology arriving mid-conversation — a completely different language with different consonant patterns.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Finland: a progressive system with remaining daily gaps
Finland has one of Europe's most developed disability inclusion systems, with Finnish Sign Language (Suomalainen viittomakieli, SVK) recognized in the Finnish Constitution since 2003 — one of the earliest constitutional recognitions of a sign language in the world. Yet even within this inclusive framework, the prevalence of childhood hearing impairment in Finland (hearing level ≥35 dB) stands at 1.1 per 1,000 births, and adult hearing loss affects a significant portion of the aging population — patterns consistent with the GBD 2019 global estimate of 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).
Constitutional recognition and high-quality audiological healthcare do not automatically extend to accessibility in everyday social settings. Finnish restaurants, cafés, and saunas — the central social environments of Finnish culture — operate without real-time captioning infrastructure. For deaf Finns, the gap between the formal inclusivity of the Finnish system and the reality of a noisy ravintola table — where the quiet, elliptic social style of Finnish conversation meets background noise — represents a daily challenge that technology, not policy alone, can address.
Captio AI captions Finnish conversation in real time — at a Helsinki ravintola, a midsummer dinner table, or a Tampere café catch-up — so a deaf person can follow every word without needing a sign language interpreter.
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
"Christmas dinner at a Helsinki ravintola — the whole family, quiet by Finnish standards but still completely impossible to lip-read. Captio AI followed every word. First Christmas where I participated fully."
"Business lunch in Tampere where my client switched between Finnish and English every few minutes. Captio AI captured both. I didn't miss a single point of the meeting."
"Eastern Finnish — the Savonian dialect — sounds so different from Helsinki. The vowel lengthening, the pace. Captio AI handled it without any trouble at a restaurant in Joensuu."
"Tuli, tuuli, tulli — three completely different words that look identical on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes all three every time. That alone makes it worth everything."
"Christmas dinner at a Helsinki ravintola — the whole family, quiet by Finnish standards but still completely impossible to lip-read. Captio AI followed every word. First Christmas where I participated fully."
"Business lunch in Tampere where my client switched between Finnish and English every few minutes. Captio AI captured both. I didn't miss a single point of the meeting."
"Eastern Finnish — the Savonian dialect — sounds so different from Helsinki. The vowel lengthening, the pace. Captio AI handled it without any trouble at a restaurant in Joensuu."
"Tuli, tuuli, tulli — three completely different words that look identical on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes all three every time. That alone makes it worth everything."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Finnish.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store