Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Indonesian 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

A warung makan dinner in Jakarta or a family restaurant in Surabaya — friends talking fast in colloquial Indonesian, Javanese phrases mixing in. Captio AI captions each speaker in real time so a deaf diner can follow the table.

💼Business lunches

A business makan siang in a Jakarta office district restaurant — Indonesian with English terms, where losing a detail about a project has real consequences. Captio AI follows every exchange.

Cafe catch-ups

A kopi catch-up at a Javanese warung or a modern Jakarta café — ambient background noise, two people across a small table. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so a deaf person can contribute.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Dining at an Indonesian restaurant abroad — in the Netherlands, Australia, or Singapore — where waitstaff speak a mix of Indonesian and English. Live Translator bridges the gap in real time.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

A Lebaran family gathering at a restaurant, a birthday makan, or a group celebration — many people, elevated noise, overlapping conversations. Captio AI makes the gathering followable.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A lunch date or one-on-one meet where conversation matters — Indonesian across a small restaurant table. Captio AI lets you follow every exchange without the accommodation being conspicuous.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Indonesian
91.1%

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.

Indonesian

Why Indonesian is hard to understand

Javanese retroflex layer

  • Retroflex consonants from Javanese colour Indonesian speech
  • Javanese adds retroflex consonants /ʈ/ (th) and /ɖ/ (dh) absent from standard Indonesian. Since the majority of Indonesian speakers are Javanese first-language speakers, Javanese-accented Indonesian — the dominant variety in Central and East Java — introduces these retroflex sounds into everyday Indonesian conversation. At a restaurant table in Yogyakarta or Solo, a deaf lip-reader encounters consonants that standard Indonesian does not have.

Formal vs colloquial register gap

  • What is written and what is said are very different
  • Standard Indonesian (Bahasa Baku) is the formal register. Colloquial Indonesian (Bahasa Gaul) used in restaurants and social settings drops affixes, substitutes informal pronouns, and uses Jakarta slang liberally. The same sentence looks and sounds completely different in the two registers, and the colloquial version is what every dining companion uses at the table.

Reduplication blurs at speed

  • Reduplicated words compress into single units
  • Indonesian uses grammatical reduplication — 'buku-buku' (books), 'jalan-jalan' (strolling). In fast speech, the reduplicated form compresses into a rapid repeated movement with no clear boundary between the two halves. At conversational speed in a noisy restaurant, reduplicated words produce a visual blur rather than a distinguishable repeated unit.

Regional language mixing

  • Javanese, Sundanese, and Batak enter without warning
  • Indonesia has over 700 regional languages. In a Jakarta restaurant, Javanese, Sundanese, Betawi, and English phrases appear mid-Indonesian conversation without any signal. Each regional language has distinct phonological features — Sundanese has phonemic distinctions absent from Indonesian, Batak has strongly retroflex varieties. A deaf lip-reader has no way to predict the switch.

Fast urban Indonesian

  • Jakarta speech rate accelerates in social settings
  • Urban Jakarta Indonesian is fast, contracted, and mixed with English and regional language insertions. The Lombard Effect at a noisy restaurant pushes all speakers faster and louder. The colloquial Indonesian of a warung makan or a mal food court bears little resemblance to the Indonesian of a textbook or a formal broadcast.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Indonesia: the scale of daily exclusion

Indonesia's Central Statistics Agency found in 2015 that almost nine million Indonesians over the age of 10 had difficulty hearing. A 2022 survey estimated more than 22 million people with disabilities in Indonesia overall — around 5% of the total population. Of these, approximately 74% of the deaf population is unemployed, a figure that reflects the severe structural exclusion faced by deaf Indonesians in both the economy and in public social life. There are only 79 schools for deaf students for a deaf student population exceeding two million, leaving one-third of deaf children with no access to any schooling.

Sign language interpreters are scarce across Indonesia — available in some government facilities and hospitals in major cities, but absent from the social settings where daily life actually happens: the warung makan, the family restaurant gathering, the kerukunan community dinner. Research on hearing loss and social dining published in 2024 found that people with hearing loss disengage from restaurant dining at significantly higher rates globally — a pattern that is especially acute in Indonesia, where communal eating is one of the central expressions of social and family life.

Captio AI captions Indonesian conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a warung makan dinner in Jakarta, a family restaurant gathering in Surabaya, or a business lunch in Bali without asking others to slow down or repeat.

Download for free

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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

"Warung makan dinners with colleagues — fast colloquial Jakarta Indonesian, Javanese phrases, English mixed in. I used to follow maybe a third. Captio AI gives me the whole conversation."

Sari W. 🇮🇩
sari.w***@gmail.com
Jakarta, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Javanese retroflex sounds in Indonesian were always invisible to me. Captio AI handles the accent and the regional mix. Family restaurant gatherings feel completely different now."

Budi H. 🇮🇩
budi.h***@gmail.com
Surabaya, deaf since childhood

"Indonesian restaurant in Melbourne with the community group — colloquial Indonesian, regional languages mixing in. Captio AI follows it all. I stopped feeling like a spectator at community meals."

Dewi S. 🇦🇺
dewi.s***@gmail.com
Melbourne diaspora, sensorineural hearing loss

"Restaurant dinner with old university friends — everyone talks fast Javanese-accented Indonesian and I used to lose the thread constantly. Captio AI gives me every word. I laugh at the right moments now."

Andi P. 🇮🇩
andi.p***@gmail.com
Yogyakarta, age-related hearing loss

"Warung makan dinners with colleagues — fast colloquial Jakarta Indonesian, Javanese phrases, English mixed in. I used to follow maybe a third. Captio AI gives me the whole conversation."

Sari W. 🇮🇩
sari.w***@gmail.com
Jakarta, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Javanese retroflex sounds in Indonesian were always invisible to me. Captio AI handles the accent and the regional mix. Family restaurant gatherings feel completely different now."

Budi H. 🇮🇩
budi.h***@gmail.com
Surabaya, deaf since childhood

"Indonesian restaurant in Melbourne with the community group — colloquial Indonesian, regional languages mixing in. Captio AI follows it all. I stopped feeling like a spectator at community meals."

Dewi S. 🇦🇺
dewi.s***@gmail.com
Melbourne diaspora, sensorineural hearing loss

"Restaurant dinner with old university friends — everyone talks fast Javanese-accented Indonesian and I used to lose the thread constantly. Captio AI gives me every word. I laugh at the right moments now."

Andi P. 🇮🇩
andi.p***@gmail.com
Yogyakarta, age-related hearing loss

Download for free

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Indonesian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store