Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Greek live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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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 Greek taverna, where the conversation flows loudly and joyfully around a shared mezze table and following everyone at once seems impossible.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Athens or Thessaloniki where formal Greek mixes with English terms and following client conversation in a busy city restaurant matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Greek kafeneio or modern café, where the sound of the espresso machine and outdoor street noise compete with the conversation at your table.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Greece as a visitor, where Greek menus and fast server explanations of daily specials come in a rush and knowing what you are ordering actually matters.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Greek restaurant — name days, Easter dinners, engagement celebrations — where the whole extended family talks at once and a bouzouki plays in the background.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a seaside restaurant in Athens, Thessaloniki, or on the islands where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves over the sound of the sea.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Greek
92.6%

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.

Greek

Why Greek is hard to understand

Dental and velar fricatives

  • Four fricative sounds produced in the throat or mouth interior
  • Modern Greek has /θ/ and /ð/ (dental fricatives, like English 'think' and 'this') and /x/ and /ɣ/ (velar fricatives). All four are produced deep in the mouth or throat and carry virtually no useful lip information. At a busy Athens taverna, these sounds appear in common everyday words and simply disappear for a deaf diner watching lips.

Standard-Cypriot divide

  • Cypriot Greek sounds different from Athenian Greek
  • Standard Modern Greek (Athens-based) and Cypriot Greek differ substantially in vowel quality, consonant phonology (Cypriot retains geminate consonants), and intonation. A deaf person accustomed to Standard Greek can find Cypriot Greek genuinely difficult — and at an Athenian restaurant with Cypriot relatives, the table shifts between varieties without pause.

Fast connected speech reduction

  • Casual Greek at a taverna is nothing like formal Greek
  • In casual Greek at a taverna table, function words reduce and become nearly inaudible, and vowels in unstressed syllables compress significantly. 'Δεν ξέρω' (I don't know) in fast speech sounds nothing like its careful pronunciation. At a lively restaurant table, this compression makes even simple phrases hard to track on the lips.

Greek-English code-switching

  • English phrases arrive without any signal
  • In Athens and Thessaloniki restaurants, English words and phrases appear constantly in menus, brand references, and casual conversation among younger speakers. Code-switching occurs without warning, confronting a deaf lip-reader with English phonology mid-conversation at a table where the base language was Greek.

Stress-timed rhythm

  • Conversation comes in uneven bursts
  • Modern Greek is stress-timed, meaning stressed syllables carry full vowel quality while unstressed syllables compress significantly. Natural Greek restaurant conversation comes in bursts of clear stressed syllables separated by compressed stretches — a rhythm that is harder to segment visually than a syllable-timed language.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Greece: policy gaps and a community left out of health planning

A cross-sectional study of deaf and hard-of-hearing adults in Greece found that people with hearing disabilities are systematically excluded from health policy and planning processes — a formal finding, not an impression (PMC6174559, Archives of Public Health 2018). Greece does not publish reliable epidemiological estimates for hearing loss prevalence, which itself reflects the low priority historically given to this population in public health infrastructure. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).

The financial crisis that began in 2010 directly impacted deaf services: government grants for Greek Sign Language (GSL) interpretation were significantly reduced during the austerity years and have not been fully restored. This means deaf Greeks encounter situations — restaurants, medical appointments, social gatherings — without the funded communication support that citizens in better-resourced European countries receive. The research on Greece's deaf community has explicitly called for inclusion in health policy design, acknowledging that decades of absence have created a significant and compounding gap.

Captio AI captions Greek conversation in real time — at a taverna in Athens, a mezze restaurant in Thessaloniki, or a family name-day dinner anywhere in Greece — so a deaf person can follow every word without waiting for a funded interpreter that the restaurant has no obligation to provide.

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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 name-day dinner at a taverna in Exarchia — everyone talking loudly over mezze. Captio AI kept up with the whole table. First time I have followed a Greek family dinner all the way through."

Ελένη Π. 🇬🇷
eleni.p***@gmail.com
Αθήνα, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Thessaloniki where my client switched between Greek and English constantly. Captio AI captured both perfectly — I didn't miss a single point of the meeting."

Νίκος Κ. 🇬🇷
nikos.k***@gmail.com
Θεσσαλονίκη, progressive hearing loss

"Cypriot Greek sounds so different from Standard — the geminates, the vowels. Captio AI handles it without any problem. Finally feel comfortable at family dinners in Cyprus."

Μαρία Χ. 🇨🇾
maria.x***@gmail.com
Λευκωσία, moderate bilateral loss

"Dinner at a Cretan restaurant — loud music, people singing at the tables, the whole experience. I put my phone on the table and followed every word of the conversation for the first time."

Γιώργος Τ. 🇬🇷
giorgos.t***@gmail.com
Κρήτη, hearing loss from noise exposure

"Family name-day dinner at a taverna in Exarchia — everyone talking loudly over mezze. Captio AI kept up with the whole table. First time I have followed a Greek family dinner all the way through."

Ελένη Π. 🇬🇷
eleni.p***@gmail.com
Αθήνα, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Thessaloniki where my client switched between Greek and English constantly. Captio AI captured both perfectly — I didn't miss a single point of the meeting."

Νίκος Κ. 🇬🇷
nikos.k***@gmail.com
Θεσσαλονίκη, progressive hearing loss

"Cypriot Greek sounds so different from Standard — the geminates, the vowels. Captio AI handles it without any problem. Finally feel comfortable at family dinners in Cyprus."

Μαρία Χ. 🇨🇾
maria.x***@gmail.com
Λευκωσία, moderate bilateral loss

"Dinner at a Cretan restaurant — loud music, people singing at the tables, the whole experience. I put my phone on the table and followed every word of the conversation for the first time."

Γιώργος Τ. 🇬🇷
giorgos.t***@gmail.com
Κρήτη, hearing loss from noise exposure

Download for free

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Greek.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store