Punjabi 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 Punjabi restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Punjabi 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 Punjab — shared sarson da saag, makki di roti, dal makhani — is a communal meal with non-stop Punjabi conversation. Following a large Punjabi family table requires real-time captions.
Business lunches in Chandigarh or Ludhiana often mix Punjabi, Hindi, and English depending on the setting. Missing a key remark in code-switched speech means missing the substance of the conversation.
A dhaba stop for chai and paranthas is a daily ritual across Punjab. Fast counter orders and banter in rapid Punjabi are exactly the kind of short exchange that a hard of hearing person finds most difficult.
Travelling and eating out across Punjab — India or Pakistan — means navigating Majhi, Malwai, Doabi, and Pakistani Punjabi varieties. Captio AI captions whatever regional speech is spoken.
Punjabi celebrations — weddings, Vaisakhi gatherings, and family milestone dinners — are famously loud and joyful. Following the table in rapid Punjabi without captioning means catching fragments of a much larger conversation.
A one-on-one lunch at a quieter Amritsar restaurant carries the expectation of sustained Punjabi conversation. Missing a sentence — especially when the tone carries the meaning — creates a gap that real-time captions close.
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 Punjabi is hard to understand
Tone distinctions invisible
- Punjabi is tonal — and the tones leave no lip trace
- Unlike most other Indo-Aryan languages, Punjabi is a tonal language with three lexical tones: high-level, low-rising, and mid-level. These distinguish minimal pairs — the same consonants and vowels mean different things depending on pitch. At a restaurant table, everyday words and food names rest on these tonal distinctions, and a lip-reader cannot see pitch.
Four-way aspiration
- Aspirated and non-aspirated consonants look identical
- Punjabi retains the full four-way stop contrast of Indo-Aryan languages. All four forms of the same base consonant are made with essentially the same lip shape. In fast Punjabi restaurant conversation, these contrasts carry meaning in food names, kinship terms, and everyday nouns.
Majhi vs Malwai dialect gap
- Eastern and western Punjabi differ significantly
- Standard Punjabi (Majhi dialect, Lahore–Amritsar belt) differs from Malwai (southern Punjab India) and Doabi in vocabulary and some consonant realisations. The Pakistan–India border has further diverged the two Punjabi writing traditions at the vocabulary level. A hard of hearing person calibrated to one variety partially misreads the other.
Fast casual compression
- Colloquial Punjabi drops heavily in casual speech
- In fast informal Punjabi — the kind spoken at a dhaba or family meal — words shorten, particles drop, and the characteristic Punjabi intonation rises and falls quickly. The gap between careful formal Punjabi and the speech at a lively table in Amritsar or Lahore is substantial.
Punjabi-Hindi-English mixing
- Urban Punjabi restaurants operate in three languages at once
- In Amritsar, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, and Lahore restaurants, Punjabi, Hindi/Urdu, and English are routinely blended. Menu terms in English, requests in Punjabi, clarifications in Hindi/Urdu — a three-way code-switch that removes the predictability of any single language.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Punjab: the cost of the unheard table
In Punjab, Pakistan, approximately 149,235 deaf persons have been recorded, with the province comprising roughly 60% of Pakistan's total population. A study on consanguinity in the Punjab region found rates as high as 80% — a documented contributor to congenital hereditary deafness. Pakistan's National Policy for Persons with Disabilities estimates 7.4% of the national population is deaf, placing the country's total deaf population at approximately 16 million. In Indian Punjab, India's national figure of 6.3% hearing impairment suggests significant numbers in the state, though Punjab-specific disaggregated data is limited.
For the Punjabi deaf community — whether in Amritsar, Lahore, Chandigarh, or the large diaspora in the UK and Canada — access to communication support in social settings remains uneven. Punjab's restaurant and dining culture is intensely communal: long shared meals, overlapping voices, animated conversation. Without real-time captioning, a deaf or hard of hearing person at a Punjabi dinner table follows a fraction of what is said.
Captio AI captions Punjabi conversation in real time — whether a friend leans across a dhaba table in fast Malwai Punjabi or the whole table breaks into simultaneous speech at a wedding meal in Lahore.
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
"Punjabi tones carry so much meaning and I can't hear them — and I definitely can't lip-read them. At a family dinner the tonal differences were completely lost on me. Captio catches the right word every time."
"UK Punjabi mixes English constantly and it's even harder to lip-read than pure Punjabi. Captio captures everything regardless of which language my relatives switch into."
"Business lunches in Chandigarh switch between Punjabi, Hindi, and English mid-sentence. I always fell behind when it switched. Captio follows the whole thing and I'm part of the conversation."
"Punjabi weddings in Canada are the loudest meals on earth. Bhangra music, a hundred people talking, fast Punjabi from relatives visiting from India. Captio gives me all of it."
"Punjabi tones carry so much meaning and I can't hear them — and I definitely can't lip-read them. At a family dinner the tonal differences were completely lost on me. Captio catches the right word every time."
"UK Punjabi mixes English constantly and it's even harder to lip-read than pure Punjabi. Captio captures everything regardless of which language my relatives switch into."
"Business lunches in Chandigarh switch between Punjabi, Hindi, and English mid-sentence. I always fell behind when it switched. Captio follows the whole thing and I'm part of the conversation."
"Punjabi weddings in Canada are the loudest meals on earth. Bhangra music, a hundred people talking, fast Punjabi from relatives visiting from India. Captio gives me all of it."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Punjabi.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store