French 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 French restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing French 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 in France is a social centrepiece — a long meal with wine, multiple courses, and the fast overlapping conversation that defines a French table. A deaf or hard of hearing person at a Parisian brasserie or a Lyon bouchon needs real-time captions to keep up.
Business lunches in France are culturally important and run long. Side comments, polite deflections, and nuanced agreements happen in the natural flow of French conversation — missing one can change your read on the entire meeting.
A café stop for an espresso is a daily ritual across France. Quick orders, cashier chat, and friends catching up at the zinc bar happen in fast French with the background noise of a busy Paris café.
Eating out while travelling through France — from a Bordeaux wine restaurant to a Marseille seafood bouillabaisse table — means encountering regional accents and Occitan-influenced French varieties. Captio AI captions whatever is spoken.
Group celebrations in France — birthday meals, anniversary dinners, Bastille Day gatherings — are loud and run well past midnight. Following a large French table in full conversational flight without captioning means missing most of it.
A one-on-one dinner at a quiet French restaurant carries the expectation of sustained, engaged conversation. Missing the punchline — which often arrives at the end of a long clause in French — creates distance that real-time captions prevent.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
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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 French is hard to understand
Liaison and elision
- Word boundaries dissolve in connected speech
- French liaison links the final consonant of one word to the opening vowel of the next — 'vous êtes' sounds like 'vouz-etes' — while elision drops vowels at word boundaries. These phonological rules mean the spoken form of French sounds nothing like the written form. At a restaurant table, a deaf or hard of hearing person cannot predict where words begin or end.
Nasal vowels
- Sounds made entirely in the back of the mouth
- French has four nasal vowels (/ã/, /ɛ̃/, /œ̃/, /ɔ̃/) produced in the nasal cavity with minimal lip movement. 'Vin' (wine), 'vent' (wind), 'vain' (vain), and 'vont' (they go) are distinguished almost entirely by the position of the velum and back of the tongue. In a restaurant, these distinctions collapse without hearing.
Schwa deletion
- Vowels drop out at conversational pace
- The French schwa is routinely deleted in fast speech: 'je ne sais pas' becomes 'j'sais pas', 'tu le vois' becomes 'tu l'vois'. These deletions cascade across a sentence, changing its rhythmic shape entirely. A lip-reader working from the full written form reads a different sentence from what was actually spoken.
Regional accent diversity
- Parisian, Marseillais, Québécois — each sounds different
- French from Paris, Lyon, Marseille, the French Caribbean, and Québec differ significantly in vowel quality, rhythm, and realisation of 'r'. Marseillais French pronounces final schwa that Parisian French drops entirely. A hard of hearing person calibrated to one regional variety will miss features of another.
Fast table speech
- French spoken over food moves very quickly
- French social conversation at meals is rapid and overlapping — an engaged French table talks fast, over each other, with frequent laughter and short back-and-forth exchanges. The pace compounds all the liaison and elision effects, leaving a lip-reader perpetually behind.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in France: the cost of silent dinner tables
A major French population study (CONSTANCES cohort, 2022) estimated that 25% of French adults are affected by some form of hearing loss, with 4% experiencing disabling impairment. As of 2014, approximately 10 million people in France — 16.1% of the population — had a hearing impairment, of whom around 360,000 had very serious or total functional limitations. Some 180,000 people identify explicitly as deaf, roughly half of whom use French Sign Language (LSF). Despite these numbers, only 37% of people with disabling hearing loss were wearing a hearing aid.
The social consequences of hearing loss in France are well documented: research consistently links it to social isolation, depression, cognitive decline, and withdrawal from public life — including the social dining culture that is central to French daily life. A 2024 study in ScienceDirect examining social dining found that hearing loss significantly reduced participation in shared meals and the social bonding they enable. French restaurant culture — loud brasseries, overlapping table conversation, fast service speech — sits at the intersection of every acoustic challenge a hard of hearing person faces.
Captio AI captions French conversation in real time — whether a waiter at a Lyon bouchon recites the plat du jour in rapid Lyonnais French, or friends at a Paris dinner table break into fast cross-talk after the second course.
[1]JAMA Network Open — prevalence of hearing loss in France, CONSTANCES study (2022)
[2]Connexion France — 25% of French adults affected by hearing loss
[3]ScienceDirect social dining — hearing loss and exclusion from shared meals (2024)
[4]GBD 2019 — hearing loss prevalence and years lived with disability
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
"A Parisian brasserie on a Friday night is one of the loudest places on earth. Fast French, overlapping voices, ambient noise from every table. Captio cuts through all of it and I stop pretending I heard the last thing my friend said."
"Business lunches in France move fast and the key thing is often said quietly, between bites, as a side comment. I was always missing exactly those parts. Captio shows me the full sentence and I respond at the right moment."
"Belgian French sounds different from Parisian French — a slower rhythm, different vowel quality. Switching between them in the same evening was confusing. Captio handles both and I follow the table whatever variety they use."
"Marseillais French is its own thing — the accent is strong, the pace is fast, and the vocabulary has local flavour. Captio follows the Marseille accent accurately and I feel part of every conversation."
"A Parisian brasserie on a Friday night is one of the loudest places on earth. Fast French, overlapping voices, ambient noise from every table. Captio cuts through all of it and I stop pretending I heard the last thing my friend said."
"Business lunches in France move fast and the key thing is often said quietly, between bites, as a side comment. I was always missing exactly those parts. Captio shows me the full sentence and I respond at the right moment."
"Belgian French sounds different from Parisian French — a slower rhythm, different vowel quality. Switching between them in the same evening was confusing. Captio handles both and I follow the table whatever variety they use."
"Marseillais French is its own thing — the accent is strong, the pace is fast, and the vocabulary has local flavour. Captio follows the Marseille accent accurately and I feel part of every conversation."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in French.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store