Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Spanish 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

A noisy tapas bar in Madrid or a terrace table in Barcelona — everyone talking at once, fast Castilian Spanish with regional accents mixing in. Captio AI keeps the full conversation accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing diners.

💼Business lunches

A business lunch at a restaurant in Mexico City or Buenos Aires — Spanish with professional vocabulary, where losing a sentence about a proposal has real consequences. Captio AI follows every word.

Cafe catch-ups

A café catch-up in Madrid, a cortado at a Valencia terraza, or a coffee in Bogotá — quieter than a restaurant but rarely quiet enough. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking in real time.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Dining in a Spanish restaurant abroad or ordering from waitstaff who speak accented English — or when travel companions speak a different language. Live Translator bridges the gap in real time with no setup.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

A cumpleaños dinner, a Navidad gathering, or a family celebration at a Spanish restaurant — multiple people, high noise, toasts and laughter. Captio AI makes the celebration followable from start to finish.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A date or one-on-one dinner at a romantic Spanish restaurant — fast, warm conversation where asking for repeats changes the dynamic. Captio AI keeps the exchange natural.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Spanish
94.7%

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.

Spanish

Why Spanish is hard to understand

Southern Spanish elision

  • Andalusian speech merges words into streams
  • Andalusian and Canarian Spanish elisde word-final consonants, merge adjacent vowels, and run phrases together into continuous streams. A deaf lip-reader in a restaurant in Seville or the Canary Islands encounters a phonological surface that bears little resemblance to the deliberate speech of a Spanish classroom.

/θ/ vs /s/ confusion

  • Castilian and Latin American Spanish look different on the lips
  • Standard Castilian Spanish uses the interdental /θ/ for c and z — 'cena' is 'θena'. Latin American Spanish merges this with /s/. At a restaurant table with mixed-origin speakers, the same word produces two different lip shapes. A deaf lip-reader trained on one system misreads the other.

Cross-Americas dialect gap

  • Dozens of Spanish varieties at a single table
  • Spanish is spoken across 20 countries, each with distinct phonological features — Mexican, Argentine, Colombian, Caribbean, Chilean. At an international restaurant table, the /s/ aspiration of Cuban Spanish, the voseo intonation of Argentine, and the rapid Caribbean Caribbean elision all arrive without warning.

Restaurant-speed elision

  • Spanish speech accelerates specifically in social settings
  • Spanish is one of the fastest spoken languages by syllable rate. In social dining settings — where conversation is animated, voices rise above ambient noise, and the Lombard Effect pushes speakers louder and faster — elision compounds. Word boundaries become invisible to the lip-reader.

Spanish-English code-switching

  • Urban Spanish flips to English mid-sentence
  • In the US, Puerto Rico, and many urban Latin American contexts, Spanish-English code-switching is the norm in restaurants. English nouns, verbs, and phrases appear mid-sentence without a signal. A deaf lip-reader tracking Spanish phonology encounters English mouth shapes with no warning.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Spain: the cost of dining exclusion

Around one in ten people in Spain live with hearing loss — approximately five million people — according to EuroTrak survey data, placing Spain fifth in Europe for hearing loss prevalence. Spain's 2008 EDAD disability survey counted 1,064,000 people with a formal hearing disability, representing 2.3% of the population. A 2022 study on hearing-disabled Spaniards found that COVID-19 masking sharply worsened social communication barriers, eliminating the lip-reading access that many people had relied upon in everyday dining settings.

Spain's national deaf federation CNSE has documented that sign language was historically prohibited in Spanish schools for decades, leaving many older deaf people without a shared communication system. For younger deaf people, the gap between legal recognition of Spanish Sign Language (in 2007) and actual interpreter provision in restaurants and social settings remains wide. Research on hearing loss and social dining published in 2024 found that people with hearing loss disengage from restaurant dining at significantly higher rates — a pattern directly observable in the Spanish context, where social dining is one of the primary forms of community life.

Captio AI captions Spanish conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a tapas dinner in Madrid, a family lunch in Seville, or a business meal in Mexico City without asking others to slow down or repeat.

Download for free

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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

"Tapas bar with friends — everyone talking fast Madrileño Spanish at once, the background noise up. I put Captio AI between me and whoever I was talking to. Best dinner I've had in years."

Elena V. 🇪🇸
elena.v***@gmail.com
Madrid, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Business lunches in a noisy Mexico City restaurant used to mean nodding and hoping. Now I follow every detail — the proposal, the numbers, the follow-up. Captio AI changed my professional life."

Carlos M. 🇲🇽
carlos.m***@gmail.com
Mexico City, deaf since childhood

"Argentine Spanish is fast and the restaurants are loud. A birthday asado with ten people was the hardest setting imaginable. Captio AI followed every voice. I laughed at the right moments for the first time."

Valentina R. 🇦🇷
valentina.r***@gmail.com
Buenos Aires, sensorineural hearing loss

"Miami restaurants mix Spanish and English constantly. I used to pick one and miss the other. Captio AI follows the switches and I follow the full conversation."

Diego S. 🇺🇸
diego.s***@gmail.com
Miami, bilateral hearing loss

"Tapas bar with friends — everyone talking fast Madrileño Spanish at once, the background noise up. I put Captio AI between me and whoever I was talking to. Best dinner I've had in years."

Elena V. 🇪🇸
elena.v***@gmail.com
Madrid, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Business lunches in a noisy Mexico City restaurant used to mean nodding and hoping. Now I follow every detail — the proposal, the numbers, the follow-up. Captio AI changed my professional life."

Carlos M. 🇲🇽
carlos.m***@gmail.com
Mexico City, deaf since childhood

"Argentine Spanish is fast and the restaurants are loud. A birthday asado with ten people was the hardest setting imaginable. Captio AI followed every voice. I laughed at the right moments for the first time."

Valentina R. 🇦🇷
valentina.r***@gmail.com
Buenos Aires, sensorineural hearing loss

"Miami restaurants mix Spanish and English constantly. I used to pick one and miss the other. Captio AI follows the switches and I follow the full conversation."

Diego S. 🇺🇸
diego.s***@gmail.com
Miami, bilateral hearing loss

Download for free

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Spanish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store