Portuguese live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Portuguese restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Portuguese 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.
A noisy churrascaria in São Paulo or a pastel de bacalhau dinner in Lisbon — friends talking fast, animated conversation across the table. Captio AI captions each speaker in real time so a deaf diner can follow.
A business almoço in Rio or a corporate lunch in Porto — Portuguese with professional vocabulary where losing a sentence about a deal has real consequences. Captio AI follows every exchange.
A café com leite catch-up at a pastelaria in Lisbon or a padaria in São Paulo — quieter than a restaurant but never truly quiet. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking across the small table.
Dining at a Portuguese restaurant abroad — in Paris, London, or New York — where waitstaff speak accented English or Portuguese. Live Translator bridges any remaining language gap in real time.
A birthday jantar, a Natal family dinner, or a festive group meal — many people, elevated noise, overlapping conversations. Captio AI makes the celebration followable from first toast to final sobremesa.
A date or one-on-one almoço where conversation matters — Portuguese across a small table in a busy city restaurant. Captio AI lets you follow every exchange without making the accommodation conspicuous.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
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 Portuguese is hard to understand
European Portuguese vowel deletion
- Unstressed vowels disappear entirely in EP
- European Portuguese systematically deletes unstressed vowels — the word 'presidente' surfaces as 'przdent' in fast speech. This is not a casual reduction but a regular phonological rule applied by every native EP speaker. At a Lisbon or Porto restaurant, words arrive as consonant clusters with near-invisible internal vowel structure.
EP vs Brazilian phonological divide
- The two main varieties look completely different on the lips
- European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have diverged phonologically to the point where speakers of one variety routinely struggle to understand the other. EP deletes vowels; BP preserves them and adds a distinct nasal quality. At an international Portuguese table, the two varieties produce different mouth shapes for the same word.
Fast Brazilian carioca speech
- Rio Brazilian is among the fastest spoken varieties
- Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) Brazilian Portuguese is fast, vowel-lenited, and extensively elided at conversational speed. The deliberate BP pronunciation used in media or classroom settings bears little resemblance to how a Rio native speaks at a restaurant table with friends.
Nasal vowels and diphthongs
- Nasal vowels produce subtle, ambiguous lip shapes
- Portuguese has a rich inventory of nasal vowels and nasal diphthongs — /ã/, /ẽ/, /ĩ/, /õ/, /ũ/ and the distinctive /ão/ ending. Nasalization is produced in the velum, not on the lips. At a restaurant table, nasal and oral vowel minimal pairs are visually indistinguishable.
Portuguese-English code-switching
- Urban Brazilian and diaspora settings mix languages
- In São Paulo, among Portuguese diaspora communities in France and Luxembourg, and in international business settings, Portuguese-English code-switching is common. A deaf lip-reader tracking Portuguese phonology encounters English without warning, requiring an instant visual pattern reset.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Brazil and Portugal: the scale of daily exclusion
In Brazil, hearing impairment affects approximately 2.3 million people aged 2 and over — 1.1% of the population — according to 2019 national health survey data. Of these, only 22.4% had any familiarity with Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Employment disparities are stark: only 25.4% of hearing-impaired people of working age are in employment, compared to 66.3% of those without disabilities. Educational exclusion compounds this — approximately 67.6% of people with disabilities lack completed primary education, limiting access to the social settings where restaurant and professional dining take place.
Research on hearing loss and social dining published in 2024 found that people with hearing loss disengage from restaurant dining at significantly higher rates than the general population. In Brazil and Portugal, where social meals — from the padaria breakfast to the Sunday churrasco — are central to daily life, this disengagement represents exclusion from one of the primary sites of social connection. Interpreter provision in Brazil outside formal institutional settings is minimal, and hearing-impaired people in restaurants have no structured support beyond their own adaptive strategies.
Captio AI captions Portuguese conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a churrascaria dinner in São Paulo, a pastel de bacalhau gathering in Lisbon, or a family almoço in Porto without asking others to slow down or repeat.
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
"Churrasco with family — twelve people, everyone talking at once in fast paulistano Portuguese. I put Captio AI on the table and followed the whole conversation. First time at a family meal in years I felt fully present."
"Carioca Portuguese is fast and the restaurants are loud. Captio AI handles the accent and the speed. Business lunches are completely different now — I catch every detail."
"European Portuguese with all the vowel deletion — even hearing people say it is hard to understand. For me it was impossible. Captio AI transcribes it accurately and I follow every conversation at my favourite tasca."
"At Portuguese community dinners in Paris the conversation switches between Portuguese and French. Captio AI follows both languages. I stopped dreading the community meals I used to love."
"Churrasco with family — twelve people, everyone talking at once in fast paulistano Portuguese. I put Captio AI on the table and followed the whole conversation. First time at a family meal in years I felt fully present."
"Carioca Portuguese is fast and the restaurants are loud. Captio AI handles the accent and the speed. Business lunches are completely different now — I catch every detail."
"European Portuguese with all the vowel deletion — even hearing people say it is hard to understand. For me it was impossible. Captio AI transcribes it accurately and I follow every conversation at my favourite tasca."
"At Portuguese community dinners in Paris the conversation switches between Portuguese and French. Captio AI follows both languages. I stopped dreading the community meals I used to love."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Portuguese.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store