Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Marathi 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

Dinner with family in Maharashtra is a central social occasion — shared thali, misal pav, and puran poli around a table where conversation runs between Marathi and Hindi effortlessly. A hard of hearing person at that table needs real-time captions to keep up.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Pune or Mumbai often happen in mid-range restaurants where conversation switches between Marathi and English depending on the colleague. Missing a term or a side comment can leave you out of the decision.

Cafe catch-ups

A tapri chai stop or café visit is a daily ritual in Maharashtra. Orders and quick catch-ups in rapid Marathi at a busy counter are exactly the kind of fast, short exchange that a deaf or hard of hearing person finds hardest.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Travelling and eating out across Maharashtra — from Konkan coastal towns to Vidarbha dhaba stops — means navigating regional Marathi varieties. Captio AI captions whichever regional speech is spoken.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Group celebrations like Ganesh Chaturthi dinners or family weddings involve loud, overlapping Marathi conversation across large tables. Following who said what without captioning means missing most of the meal.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A one-on-one lunch or dinner in a quieter Pune café carries the expectation of sustained conversation in Marathi. Missing a sentence — especially a question or a joke — creates distance that real-time captions prevent.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Marathi
93.1%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

Marathi

Why Marathi is hard to understand

Four-way aspiration

  • Consonant pairs that look identical on the lips
  • Marathi has a four-way contrast in stops: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced aspirated/breathy. These four forms of the same base consonant are produced in nearly the same lip position. At a restaurant table in Pune or Mumbai, a server distinguishing 'pal' (moment) from 'phal' (fruit) gives no visible lip difference at all.

Retroflex-dental pairs

  • The tongue position is invisible
  • Marathi contrasts dental and retroflex consonants (/n/ vs /ɳ/, /s/ vs /ʂ/). The difference lies entirely in where the tongue tip contacts the palate — nothing visible from outside. In a restaurant exchange, these distinctions carry meaning in food names, place references, and everyday nouns.

Marathwada-Vidarbha dialect gap

  • Regional speech simplifies consonants differently
  • In the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions, spoken Marathi simplifies retroflex consonants: /ɳ/ and /ʂ/ merge with /n/ and /s/. This creates homophones between regional and standard Marathi. A lip-reader calibrated to one variety will misread the other across restaurants in Maharashtra.

Schwa deletion

  • Vowels drop out in natural speech
  • Marathi, like Hindi, undergoes schwa deletion in fast speech: word-internal and word-final schwas are often not pronounced. Restaurant food names shrink in ways that don't match their spelling, and a lip-reader working from the written form of a menu item may not match what the server actually says.

Marathi-Hindi-English mixing

  • Urban restaurants operate in three languages at once
  • In Mumbai and Pune, restaurant conversation routinely switches between Marathi, Hindi, and English within the same sentence. Waiters use English menu terms, switch to Hindi for clarity, and address regular customers in Marathi — sometimes all in one breath.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss in India: the barriers behind every shared meal

India has approximately 63 million people with significant hearing impairment — 6.3% of the national population — according to WHO estimates. Among the total population of persons with disability in India (approximately 26.8 million formally registered), 5.07 million are recorded with hearing loss, making it the second most common disability category. Maharashtra, home to Marathi, has one of the highest concentrations of deaf schools in the country alongside Tamil Nadu and Delhi.

Oralist educational approaches have historically dominated deaf education in India, prioritising speech and lip-reading over sign language. This leaves many deaf and hard of hearing people in India equipped with lip-reading skills but no systemic support in noisy public environments like restaurants. A 2025 study on language policy and deaf education in India noted that oralism's grip on curricula has slowed both Indian Sign Language adoption and the development of captioning-based alternatives in public life.

Captio AI captions Marathi conversation in real time — whether a cousin describes a new dish in fast Mumbai Marathi across a family thali spread, or a colleague mentions a figure during a business lunch in a noisy Pune restaurant.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Family dinners in Marathi are the setting where I feel most left out — everyone speaks fast, overlaps, and laughs at things I can't follow. Captio changes that. I follow the whole conversation now."

Priya D. 🇮🇳
priya.d***@gmail.com
Pune, moderate hearing loss

"Mumbai restaurant conversation mixes Marathi, Hindi, and English in the same sentence. I always fell behind when it switched. Captio follows the whole thing and I actually keep up."

Rahul S. 🇮🇳
rahul.s***@gmail.com
Mumbai, wears hearing aids

"Vidarbha Marathi sounds different from Pune Marathi and that gap always confused me. Captio handles both and the text makes clear which words were actually used — especially the food names I always got wrong."

Meena K. 🇮🇳
meena.k***@gmail.com
Nagpur, congenital deafness

"Business lunches used to make me anxious because I knew I'd miss something important. Captio runs in the background and I read exactly what my colleagues say, in Marathi or English."

Anil P. 🇮🇳
anil.p***@gmail.com
Nashik, sensorineural hearing loss

"Family dinners in Marathi are the setting where I feel most left out — everyone speaks fast, overlaps, and laughs at things I can't follow. Captio changes that. I follow the whole conversation now."

Priya D. 🇮🇳
priya.d***@gmail.com
Pune, moderate hearing loss

"Mumbai restaurant conversation mixes Marathi, Hindi, and English in the same sentence. I always fell behind when it switched. Captio follows the whole thing and I actually keep up."

Rahul S. 🇮🇳
rahul.s***@gmail.com
Mumbai, wears hearing aids

"Vidarbha Marathi sounds different from Pune Marathi and that gap always confused me. Captio handles both and the text makes clear which words were actually used — especially the food names I always got wrong."

Meena K. 🇮🇳
meena.k***@gmail.com
Nagpur, congenital deafness

"Business lunches used to make me anxious because I knew I'd miss something important. Captio runs in the background and I read exactly what my colleagues say, in Marathi or English."

Anil P. 🇮🇳
anil.p***@gmail.com
Nashik, sensorineural hearing loss

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Marathi.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store