Tamil 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 Tamil restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Tamil 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 Tamil Nadu — shared rice with rasam, sambar, and sides — is a long, overlapping conversation that runs from the first course to the last. Following fast Tamil around a family table requires real-time captions.
Business lunches in Chennai or Coimbatore often switch between Tamil and English depending on the colleague. Missing a term or a side comment in Tamil can leave you out of the decision.
A filter coffee stop at a local café or Saravana Bhavan is a daily ritual in Tamil Nadu. Quick orders and conversation happen in rapid Tamil at the counter, and the noise of a busy Chennai café adds difficulty.
Travelling and eating out across Tamil Nadu — from a Chettinad restaurant to a coastal Kumbakonam eatery — means navigating local Tamil varieties and accents. Captio AI captions whatever is spoken.
Group celebrations and family functions in Tamil culture are large and festive. Overlapping Tamil conversation across a full table at a wedding reception or birthday meal is exactly the setting where captioning makes participation possible.
A one-on-one lunch at a quieter restaurant in Chennai carries the expectation of sustained conversation in Tamil or Tamil-English. Missing a sentence creates the gap that real-time captions prevent.
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 Tamil is hard to understand
Severe diglossia
- Formal and spoken Tamil are almost different languages
- Tamil is one of the world's most diglossic languages: the literary standard (centamil) used in written text is radically different from the colloquial variety (koduntamil) spoken at the restaurant table. For a deaf or hard of hearing person, reading lips trained on formal Tamil means reading a completely different phonological system from what is actually spoken over a shared meal.
Vowel length distinctions
- Long and short vowels look identical
- Tamil has ten vowels — five short and five long — and vowel length is phonemically contrastive: 'pāl' (milk) vs 'pal' (teeth). Both look the same on the lips. At a restaurant table, dish names and everyday nouns depend on these length distinctions, and a lip-reader gets no visual signal to distinguish them.
Retroflex system
- Dental, alveolar, and retroflex positions all look the same
- Tamil distinguishes up to three places of articulation for some consonant series: dental, alveolar, and retroflex. The rare retroflex approximant (ழ /ɻ/) — produced far back with no external lip movement — is maintained even in fast casual speech. In a restaurant, the correct reading of which position was used changes the word entirely.
Fast colloquial compression
- Spoken Tamil compresses dramatically at the table
- Colloquial Tamil in a restaurant or family gathering drops syllables and contracts morphemes to near-unrecognisable forms. Fast Chennai Tamil compresses phrases that bear little resemblance to the written standard. A lip-reader trained on formal Tamil is reading a different language from what is spoken.
Regional variety gap
- Sri Lankan, Malaysian, and Indian Tamil varieties differ
- Sri Lankan Tamil retains features — consonant distinctions and vowel contrasts — that have merged in Chennai Tamil. Malaysian and Singapore Tamil carry further influences. A hard of hearing person who grew up with one regional Tamil variety is partially reading another language when a speaker from a different diaspora sits across the table.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in India: the barriers behind Tamil tables
India has approximately 63 million people with significant hearing impairment — 6.3% of the national population. Among India's 26.8 million registered persons with disability, hearing loss is the second most common category at 18.91% of all disability registrations. Tamil Nadu has one of the highest concentrations of deaf schools in India alongside Maharashtra and Delhi — reflecting the scale of need in a state of over 80 million people.
The 2011 Census revealed that out of 13.4 million individuals aged 15–59 with a hearing disability in India, only 26.1% were in stable employment. Oralist educational approaches remain dominant in Tamil Nadu's deaf schools, teaching lip-reading and spoken Tamil while limiting sign language access. This leaves many deaf adults with skills that function in quiet, slow, formal speech — but fail them in the fast colloquial Tamil of restaurants and family tables.
Captio AI captions Tamil conversation in real time — whether a family member passes a dish at a shared Chennai thali and explains what it is, or a colleague mentions a figure during a business lunch in a noisy Coimbatore restaurant.
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
"Colloquial Chennai Tamil is almost unrecognisable compared to written Tamil and I struggled with lip-reading even before the hearing loss. Captio catches the full colloquial speed and I follow the table properly."
"Business lunches in Tamil Nadu switch between Tamil and English mid-sentence. Captio follows both and I actually contribute to the conversation instead of nodding along."
"Sri Lankan Tamil sounds quite different from Chennai Tamil and I grew up with the Jaffna variety. Visiting relatives in India was always confusing. Captio handles both varieties and the difference finally doesn't matter."
"A full family function in Tamil is the loudest meal of my life. Everyone talks at once in fast Madurai Tamil. Captio gives me all of it and I finally follow the whole table."
"Colloquial Chennai Tamil is almost unrecognisable compared to written Tamil and I struggled with lip-reading even before the hearing loss. Captio catches the full colloquial speed and I follow the table properly."
"Business lunches in Tamil Nadu switch between Tamil and English mid-sentence. Captio follows both and I actually contribute to the conversation instead of nodding along."
"Sri Lankan Tamil sounds quite different from Chennai Tamil and I grew up with the Jaffna variety. Visiting relatives in India was always confusing. Captio handles both varieties and the difference finally doesn't matter."
"A full family function in Tamil is the loudest meal of my life. Everyone talks at once in fast Madurai Tamil. Captio gives me all of it and I finally follow the whole table."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Tamil.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store