Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Tagalog 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

Catching up with friends at a Manila neighbourhood restaurant, where the conversation flows naturally between Tagalog and English and everyone talks at once over shared dishes.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in BGC or Makati, where formal Filipino mixes with English terms and reading lips across a crowded lunch table in a noisy restaurant is harder than it sounds.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Quezon City coffee shop, where barista calls and background music compete with the conversation you are actually trying to follow.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out at a local Filipino restaurant on a visit to the Philippines, where menu explanations and server recommendations arrive fast and vary by province.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Filipino restaurant — fiestas, birthdays, graduations — where the whole extended family talks simultaneously in a mix of Tagalog, English, and regional languages.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a restaurant in Poblacion or Bonifacio where the music is always too loud and you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Tagalog
89.2%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

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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.

Tagalog

Why Tagalog is hard to understand

Taglish code-switching

  • The language shifts mid-sentence
  • Filipino restaurant conversation constantly switches between Tagalog and English without pause or signal. This Taglish mixing is so fluid that even lip-readers familiar with Tagalog lose the thread when the language shifts to English mid-phrase at a Manila dinner table.

Glottal stop compression

  • Syllable boundaries collapse
  • Tagalog's glottal stop /ʔ/ appears between vowels and at word boundaries but leaves no visible lip movement. In fast table talk, these stops collapse syllable boundaries — words blend together with nothing on the lips to signal where one ends and another begins.

Regional stress variation

  • The same word sounds different by province
  • Tagalog stress placement changes meaning — baba vs babá, halika vs halíka — and speakers from Cebu, Iloilo, or Pampanga carry different rhythms. At a group dinner with mixed regional backgrounds, the same word arrives with a different shape depending on who is speaking.

Fast casual elision

  • Syllables drop in everyday speech
  • Casual Filipino speech drops syllables and runs words together: 'ano' becomes ''no,' 'hindi' becomes ''di,' 'ganito' becomes 'nito.' Around a busy restaurant table, this compression leaves a deaf diner tracking fragments rather than whole words.

Multilingual environment

  • The language of the table is never fixed
  • Philippine restaurants mix Tagalog, regional languages like Cebuano or Ilocano, English, and Spanish loanwords in a single meal. A deaf person watching lips has no way of anticipating which language any given phrase will arrive in — or which lip patterns apply.

Download for free

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in the Philippines: the numbers behind the silence

The Philippines has one of the highest rates of hearing loss in Southeast Asia. A national survey published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Public Health (2020) found an overall prevalence of moderate or worse hearing loss of 15% across the Philippine population — rising to 49.1% among adults aged 65 and older. In children, the rate stands at 7.5%, and among working-age adults it is 14.7%. These figures are substantially higher than those reported in high-income countries, with a greater proportion of severe-to-profound cases linked to limited access to early diagnosis and hearing devices.

The Philippine Statistics Authority recorded 1.64 million persons with disability as of mid-2024 — a number widely acknowledged as an undercount, given the barriers to official registration that many communities face. Filipino Sign Language was formally recognized as the national sign language through Republic Act 11106 in 2018, a landmark law. Yet implementation of accessible communication in public settings — restaurants, shops, transport — remains uneven. The restaurant and hospitality sector operates almost entirely without real-time captioning or interpreter access.

Captio AI captions Filipino and Tagalog conversation in real time — at a Makati business lunch, a Manila fiesta dinner, or a neighbourhood restaurant in Quezon City — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table without needing an interpreter present.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

"At a birthday dinner in Pasig, seven cousins talking over each other in Taglish. Captio AI kept up with every switch between Tagalog and English — I finally felt like I was part of the conversation, not just watching it."

Maria L. 🇵🇭
maria.l***@gmail.com
Pasig, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss

"Business lunch at a Makati resto where my client kept switching between Tagalog and English mid-sentence. I used to nod and hope I caught the key points — now I catch every detail."

Jose R. 🇵🇭
jose.r***@gmail.com
Cebu, progressive hearing loss

"Family fiestas used to be the hardest setting — everyone talking loudly in Cebuano and Tagalog at once. Captio AI captures both and I finally enjoy these gatherings instead of dreading them."

Ana G. 🇵🇭
ana.g***@gmail.com
Davao, profound hearing loss since birth

"Dates at a noisy Poblacion restaurant — the music is always too loud. I point my phone discreetly and catch every word without asking anyone to repeat themselves."

Carlo M. 🇵🇭
carlo.m***@gmail.com
Quezon City, mild-to-moderate bilateral loss

"At a birthday dinner in Pasig, seven cousins talking over each other in Taglish. Captio AI kept up with every switch between Tagalog and English — I finally felt like I was part of the conversation, not just watching it."

Maria L. 🇵🇭
maria.l***@gmail.com
Pasig, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss

"Business lunch at a Makati resto where my client kept switching between Tagalog and English mid-sentence. I used to nod and hope I caught the key points — now I catch every detail."

Jose R. 🇵🇭
jose.r***@gmail.com
Cebu, progressive hearing loss

"Family fiestas used to be the hardest setting — everyone talking loudly in Cebuano and Tagalog at once. Captio AI captures both and I finally enjoy these gatherings instead of dreading them."

Ana G. 🇵🇭
ana.g***@gmail.com
Davao, profound hearing loss since birth

"Dates at a noisy Poblacion restaurant — the music is always too loud. I point my phone discreetly and catch every word without asking anyone to repeat themselves."

Carlo M. 🇵🇭
carlo.m***@gmail.com
Quezon City, mild-to-moderate bilateral loss

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Tagalog.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store