Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Latvian 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🍽️Dinner with friends

A dinner with friends in a Riga restorāns, the conversation mixing Latvian and Russian depending on who's speaking and the topic at hand.

💼Business lunches

A business lunch in a city-centre restaurant where formal Latvian is used but loanwords and abbreviations appear constantly.

Cafe catch-ups

Coffee in a Rīga kafejnīca, the barista talking to a colleague across the counter in fast urban Latvian while you wait for your order.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Ordering in a Latgalian restaurant where the server speaks the local High Latvian variety, quite different from standard Latvian.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

A name-day celebration dinner with extended family, the table mixing Latvian and Russian, grandparents in one language and grandchildren in the other.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A quiet one-to-one dinner where ambient sound from the restaurant and the softness of a private conversation make word endings disappear.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Latvian
89.9%

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.

Latvian

Why Latvian is hard to understand

Three-pitch tonal system

  • Tone contrasts invisible on the lips
  • Standard Latvian distinguishes three lexical tones — level, rising, and broken (interrupted/falling) — that differentiate meaning between otherwise identical-looking words. At a restaurant table, a deaf person cannot recover these tonal contrasts from lip shape alone and must rely entirely on sentence context to identify the correct word.

High Latvian (Latgalian) divide

  • Latgalian and standard Latvian sound very different
  • The eastern High Latvian dialect — the basis of Latgalian, sometimes regarded as a separate language — differs substantially from standard Central Latvian in vowel quality, intonation, and consonant inventory. A deaf diner from Riga in a Daugavpils restaurant encounters a phonological environment that standard-trained lip-reading strategies do not fully prepare for.

Palatal consonants

  • Palatalization invisible at the lips
  • Latvian uses palatalised consonants (/ɲ/, /ļ/, /k̑/, /ģ/) as phonemically distinct from their plain counterparts. These are produced with the tongue body raised toward the palate — a distinction almost invisible at the lips — and easily missed in the rapid flow of dinner conversation.

Phonemic vowel length

  • Short and long vowels look the same
  • Latvian contrasts short and long vowels across its 12-vowel system. In fast speech, the duration distinction compresses and minimal pairs look identical on the lips. A deaf diner must resolve a high rate of visually ambiguous word pairs from context alone.

Latvian-Russian code-switching

  • Russian enters mid-sentence in mixed settings
  • Approximately 25–30% of Latvia's population are Russian speakers, and in mixed-language households and city neighbourhoods, Latvian and Russian mix freely at the restaurant table. A deaf Latvian speaker may find a mid-sentence shift into Russian — with a different phonological inventory — breaking the visual coherence of the conversation unexpectedly.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Latvia: a bilingual country, a layered challenge

Latvia's disability policy assessment system recognises hearing impairment as a significant category within its formal severity classifications, but specific national hearing loss prevalence data is sparse in the public record. GBD 2019 global estimates project that approximately 15–20% of the European population experiences some degree of hearing loss — applied to Latvia's roughly 1.8 million residents, this implies several hundred thousand Latvians managing meaningful hearing difficulty in daily life. Latvia's disability assessment framework provides some rehabilitation services for people with hearing impairments, but the scale of provision remains limited relative to the scope of need.

European research on hearing loss barriers (PMC12101339) consistently finds that employment, social participation, and healthcare access are the areas where deaf and hard of hearing adults report the greatest impact. Latvia's bilingual population presents a compound challenge: a hard of hearing Latvian in a mixed-language environment must track two phonological systems — Latvian and Russian — simultaneously, which amplifies the cognitive and communicative load in restaurant settings where background noise is already high.

Captio AI captions live Latvian conversation in real time, so a seat at the table on a Jāṇi summer evening or a winter Sunday dinner means following the conversation, not watching it from across the counter.

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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

"Riga restaurants mix Latvian and Russian at the same table and the switching used to lose me entirely. Captio AI handles both languages and I follow the full conversation now — without asking anyone to repeat themselves."

Daina L. 🇱🇻
daina.l***@gmail.com
Riga, sensorineural hearing loss since childhood

"Latgalian Latvian is different enough from Riga Latvian that business lunches in Daugavpils used to cost me key sentences. Captio AI captions the local dialect without any special settings."

Māris K. 🇱🇻
maris.k***@gmail.com
Daugavpils, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Long vowels and the tonal differences in Latvian were the first things I started missing when my hearing declined. Captio AI captures them — the first Jāṇi dinner I've followed properly in three years."

Ilze P. 🇱🇻
ilze.p***@gmail.com
Jūrmala, age-related high-frequency hearing loss

"Name-day dinners in Liepāja are loud and everyone talks at once in Latvian and some Russian. Captio AI gives me the full text of what each person is saying — I stop guessing and start contributing."

Andris B. 🇱🇻
andris.b***@gmail.com
Liepāja, congenital profound hearing loss

"Riga restaurants mix Latvian and Russian at the same table and the switching used to lose me entirely. Captio AI handles both languages and I follow the full conversation now — without asking anyone to repeat themselves."

Daina L. 🇱🇻
daina.l***@gmail.com
Riga, sensorineural hearing loss since childhood

"Latgalian Latvian is different enough from Riga Latvian that business lunches in Daugavpils used to cost me key sentences. Captio AI captions the local dialect without any special settings."

Māris K. 🇱🇻
maris.k***@gmail.com
Daugavpils, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Long vowels and the tonal differences in Latvian were the first things I started missing when my hearing declined. Captio AI captures them — the first Jāṇi dinner I've followed properly in three years."

Ilze P. 🇱🇻
ilze.p***@gmail.com
Jūrmala, age-related high-frequency hearing loss

"Name-day dinners in Liepāja are loud and everyone talks at once in Latvian and some Russian. Captio AI gives me the full text of what each person is saying — I stop guessing and start contributing."

Andris B. 🇱🇻
andris.b***@gmail.com
Liepāja, congenital profound hearing loss

Download for free

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Latvian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store