Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Swedish live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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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 friends at a traditional Swedish krog or neighbourhood restaurant, where the conversation flows quickly and the background sound of a busy dining room competes with what people are saying.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Stockholm's Östermalm or Gothenburg's business district, where Swedish and English mix across the table and following client conversation in a busy restaurant matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Swedish fika café or modern coffee bar, where the sound of the espresso machine and ambient conversation compete with the person sitting across from you.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Sweden as a visitor, where Swedish menus and fast server recommendations in regional accents are challenging to follow and knowing what you are ordering matters.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Swedish restaurant — midsommar dinners, Christmas julbord, birthday gatherings — where multiple generations talk simultaneously and background music fills the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a Stockholm waterfront restaurant or a Gothenburg seafood place where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves over the ambient noise.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Swedish
91.8%

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.

Swedish

Why Swedish is hard to understand

Pitch accent — two tones invisible on the lips

  • Swedish distinguishes words by tone — with nothing to see
  • Swedish is one of the few European languages with lexical pitch accent, distinguishing words by two tone patterns: acute (tone 1) and grave (tone 2). Minimal pairs like anden (the duck, tone 1) vs. anden (the spirit, tone 2) look identical on the lips but mean completely different things. At a Swedish restaurant table, this tonal distinction is entirely lost to lip-reading.

Retroflex clusters

  • Consonants merge and curl back in Central Swedish
  • Central and Northern Swedish (Stockholm, Uppsala) merge /d/, /l/, /n/, /s/, and /t/ after /r/ into retroflex sounds — produced with the tongue curled back behind the teeth. These retroflex articulations carry no visible lip difference from their non-retroflex counterparts. A deaf person at a Stockholm restaurant table encounters this merger constantly in everyday speech.

North-South phonological divide

  • Skånska sounds nothing like Stockholm Swedish
  • Southern Swedish (Skånska) uses a uvular fricative and has markedly different vowel qualities from Central and Northern Swedish. Göteborg Swedish has its own characteristic intonation. A deaf diner accustomed to one regional variety faces a genuine phonological shift when the table includes speakers from another part of Sweden.

Swedish-English code-switching

  • English phrases arrive without warning
  • In Sweden's urban restaurant scene, English words and phrases appear constantly — a result of Sweden's high English proficiency and the dominance of English in media, tech, and business. At a Stockholm or Gothenburg restaurant table, speakers shift from Swedish to English mid-sentence without any signal, confronting a deaf lip-reader with a completely different phonological system.

Fast connected speech

  • Swedish vowels reduce and compress at restaurant pace
  • Swedish has a rich inventory of long and short vowel distinctions (9 vowel qualities × 2 lengths = 17–18 contrasts in Standard Swedish). In fast restaurant conversation, short vowels in unstressed syllables reduce significantly. The gap between careful Swedish and the natural pace of a Stockholm dinner table is larger than most learners expect.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Sweden: participation gaps behind a progressive welfare system

Among Swedish adults, 13.1% of men and 9.8% of women report hearing difficulties — a prevalence that carries direct economic consequences. A cross-sectional population-based study found that the odds of receiving sickness benefits or disability pension were 1.36 times higher for men and 1.70 times higher for women with hearing difficulties compared to hearing peers (PMC3533986, BMC Public Health 2012). An epidemiological study in Sweden in 2020 confirmed that sensory difficulties, including hearing loss, disproportionately affect older adults and migrants — populations who may have less access to formal sign language education and interpreter services (PMC11468505).

Sweden was one of the first countries in the world to legally recognize Swedish Sign Language (Svenskt teckenspråk, STS), doing so in 1981. The estimated prevalence of severe-to-profound hearing impairment is approximately 0.2% of the Swedish population, while the deaf signing community is estimated at 0.7 per 1,000 inhabitants. Despite Sweden's inclusive social policy framework, restaurant environments — with high background noise, no captioning infrastructure, and no interpreter obligation — remain daily communication challenges that even Sweden's comprehensive welfare system has not resolved.

Captio AI captions Swedish conversation in real time — at a Stockholm krog, a Gothenburg julbord, or a family midsommar dinner — so a deaf person can follow every word from the table without needing an interpreter.

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

"Julbord dinner at a Stockholm restaurant — the whole extended family, Christmas music, clink of glasses. Captio AI followed every conversation around the table. First Christmas dinner where I actually participated fully."

Anna L. 🇸🇪
anna.l***@gmail.com
Stockholm, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in central Gothenburg — my client switched between Swedish and English every few sentences. Captio AI captured both seamlessly. I didn't have to ask for anything to be repeated."

Erik J. 🇸🇪
erik.j***@gmail.com
Göteborg, moderate progressive loss

"Skånska Swedish is very different from Stockholm Swedish — I was worried about the accent. Captio AI handled it perfectly at a Malmö restaurant. The accuracy was genuinely surprising."

Sara H. 🇸🇪
sara.h***@gmail.com
Malmö, profound bilateral loss

"Swedish pitch accent is completely invisible on the lips — anden the duck or anden the spirit, I could never tell. Captio AI solves this every single time. It changes the whole experience of going out."

Lars B. 🇸🇪
lars.b***@gmail.com
Uppsala, hearing loss since 40s

"Julbord dinner at a Stockholm restaurant — the whole extended family, Christmas music, clink of glasses. Captio AI followed every conversation around the table. First Christmas dinner where I actually participated fully."

Anna L. 🇸🇪
anna.l***@gmail.com
Stockholm, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in central Gothenburg — my client switched between Swedish and English every few sentences. Captio AI captured both seamlessly. I didn't have to ask for anything to be repeated."

Erik J. 🇸🇪
erik.j***@gmail.com
Göteborg, moderate progressive loss

"Skånska Swedish is very different from Stockholm Swedish — I was worried about the accent. Captio AI handled it perfectly at a Malmö restaurant. The accuracy was genuinely surprising."

Sara H. 🇸🇪
sara.h***@gmail.com
Malmö, profound bilateral loss

"Swedish pitch accent is completely invisible on the lips — anden the duck or anden the spirit, I could never tell. Captio AI solves this every single time. It changes the whole experience of going out."

Lars B. 🇸🇪
lars.b***@gmail.com
Uppsala, hearing loss since 40s

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Swedish.

Captio AI is free to start

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