Persian 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 Persian restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Persian 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 family in Iran — shared ghormeh sabzi, tahdig, and kubideh kebab — is a long social meal where conversation is constant and fast. A hard of hearing person at a Persian family table needs real-time captions to follow.
Business lunches in Tehran tend to be relationship-building affairs. Persian ta'arof embeds real meaning in polite phrasing — missing a sentence can mean misreading the entire social dynamic.
A quick tea stop at a traditional chaikhaneh or modern café is a daily ritual. Orders and conversation happen fast at the counter, and the background noise of a busy Tehran café adds difficulty.
Travelling and eating out across Iran — from an Isfahani restaurant serving beryani to a northern Caspian coastal fish spot — means navigating regional accents and local varieties. Captio AI captions whatever is spoken.
Persian celebrations — Nowruz gatherings, birthday parties, and weddings — involve long tables of extended family where conversation overlaps and noise makes lip-reading almost impossible.
A one-on-one dinner at a quieter Tehran restaurant carries the social weight of sustained Persian conversation. Missing a sentence — especially the turn-final verb where meaning accumulates — creates a gap that 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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Download on theApp Store
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 Persian is hard to understand
Pharyngeal and uvular sounds
- Arabic-derived consonants produced at the back of the throat
- Persian uses pharyngeal (عَ /ʕ/) and uvular (غ /ɣ/, ق /q/) consonants borrowed from Arabic — all produced deep in the throat or pharynx with no visible lip movement. These sounds appear in loanwords common in Persian food culture and everyday polite speech. At a restaurant table, a lip-reader sees nothing where these consonants occur.
Tehrani vowel reduction
- Vowels collapse in fast Tehrani speech
- Colloquial Tehrani Persian reduces vowels dramatically. Classical Persian has six distinct vowels; in fast casual speech these merge and reduce further. At a Tehran restaurant, what is heard is far more compressed than what any written form would suggest — and a lip-reader working from careful formal Persian is reading a different register.
Iranian vs Dari vs Tajik gap
- Three national varieties sound different
- Iranian Farsi, Afghan Dari, and Tajik Persian have distinct vowel systems, intonation patterns, and vocabulary. The vowel shift that changed Classical Persian /ā/ in Iran — but not in Afghanistan — means lip patterns differ predictably across national varieties. A hard of hearing person calibrated to one variety partially misreads another.
Fast social Persian
- Casual restaurant speech compresses into near-invisibility
- Persian at a dinner table with friends moves fast and informally. Words shorten, suffixes are swallowed, and politeness particles compress. The gap between classroom Persian and natural conversation over ash-e reshteh at a Tehran family table is very wide.
Persian-English mixing
- Urban and diaspora restaurants blend both languages
- In Tehran's newer restaurants and in diaspora Persian settings (Los Angeles, Toronto, London), English words are embedded freely into Persian sentences without signal — removing the predictability of pure Persian phonology for a deaf or hard of hearing diner.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Iran: the cost of exclusion at the Persian table
A population-based study in Tehran (2012–2013) found a hearing impairment prevalence of 14.27%, with approximately 5.19% experiencing disabling hearing loss. Among disability types recorded in Iranian surveys, hearing loss was the most common category at 68.3% of all disability registrations — indicating that Iran's disability population is disproportionately composed of people with hearing conditions.
Consanguineous marriage is a significant contributor to congenital deafness in Iran: a study on cochlear implant candidates found consanguinity among parents of Iranian deaf children nearly twice the national average (65% vs 38%). A 2022 PMC situation analysis of Iran's ear and hearing care programme identified systemic gaps — insufficient audiological workforce, limited hearing aid coverage, and inadequate early detection — that leave a large share of the hearing-impaired population without support for daily life, including the social dining settings central to Iranian culture.
Captio AI captions Persian conversation in real time — whether the server at a traditional Tehran restaurant lists the khoresh options in rapid Tehrani Persian, or family members talk over each other at a Nowruz dinner table.
[1]PMC5632326 — prevalence of hearing impairment by age and gender in Iran
[2]PMC9391755 — situation analysis of ear and hearing care in Iran (2022)
[3]GBD 2019 — hearing loss prevalence and years lived with disability
[4]ScienceDirect social dining — hearing loss and exclusion from shared meals (2024)
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
"Fast Tehrani Persian at a dinner table is already different from what I learned — and I'm Persian. With hearing loss the gap was even wider. Captio shows me what people actually said and I feel present at meals again."
"Business lunches involve so much ta'arof that the real meaning is buried in the final verb. I was always missing exactly that part. Captio shows me the whole sentence."
"Diaspora Persian in Toronto mixes Farsi and English constantly. I lip-read Farsi but the English parts always tripped me up. Captio captures both and I follow the whole conversation."
"Nowruz family dinners are huge — lots of people, fast Persian, everyone talking at once. Captio runs in the background and I follow the whole table without exhausting myself trying to lip-read."
"Fast Tehrani Persian at a dinner table is already different from what I learned — and I'm Persian. With hearing loss the gap was even wider. Captio shows me what people actually said and I feel present at meals again."
"Business lunches involve so much ta'arof that the real meaning is buried in the final verb. I was always missing exactly that part. Captio shows me the whole sentence."
"Diaspora Persian in Toronto mixes Farsi and English constantly. I lip-read Farsi but the English parts always tripped me up. Captio captures both and I follow the whole conversation."
"Nowruz family dinners are huge — lots of people, fast Persian, everyone talking at once. Captio runs in the background and I follow the whole table without exhausting myself trying to lip-read."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Persian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store