Turkish live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Turkish restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Turkish 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 friends or family in Turkey is a long, relaxed occasion built around meze, shared plates, and continuous conversation. A hard of hearing person at a Turkish family table needs real-time captions to follow the overlapping Türkçe.
Business lunches in Istanbul or Ankara move between formal Turkish and business English, and a missed remark — especially a politely worded refusal or offer — can have real professional consequences.
A kahvaltı breakfast spread or afternoon çay stop is a core social ritual in Turkey. Quick conversation at a café counter or traditional tea house happens fast, and the ambient noise of a busy Istanbul café adds difficulty.
Eating out across Turkey — from a Black Sea restaurant serving hamsi to a southeastern kebap lokantası — means navigating regional Turkish varieties and accents that standard Turkish preparation doesn't cover.
Group celebrations and family gatherings in Turkey are large, festive, and loud. Overlapping conversation at a long table of relatives speaking fast Turkish is exactly the situation where captioning makes participation possible.
A one-on-one dinner in a quieter Istanbul restaurant carries the social weight of sustained conversation in Turkish. Missing a sentence — especially a turn-final clause where meaning accumulates — creates an awkward 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 Turkish is hard to understand
Vowel harmony invisible
- Front/back distinctions carried entirely by tongue position
- Turkish vowel harmony means that back vowels (/a/, /ı/, /o/, /u/) alternate with front vowels (/e/, /i/, /ö/, /ü/) in a pattern invisible on the lips — the tongue position shifts deep inside the mouth while the lip shape often stays the same. A lip-reader cannot distinguish 'gelin' (come) from 'gülen' (smiling) by sight alone.
Agglutinative compression
- Entire sentences packed into single words
- Turkish stacks suffixes onto verb and noun stems to create long words that carry a full clause's worth of meaning. In fast table speech, these compound words are said as a single blur — and a single missed vowel suffix can reverse the meaning of what was said.
Final obstruent devoicing
- Voiced/voiceless distinctions collapse at word ends
- Turkish devoices final obstruents: /d/ and /t/, /g/ and /k/ at word ends look and sound alike in isolation. In a restaurant order, this can mean mishearing a food name's final consonant — turning one dish into another.
Regional dialect gap
- Istanbul vs Anatolian vs Black Sea Turkish
- Standard Istanbul Turkish is the prestige variety, but Black Sea Turkish (Karadeniz), Eastern Anatolian, and Kurdish-influenced Turkish variants differ significantly in vowel quality and consonant realisation. A hard of hearing person calibrated to Istanbul speech may not track a server or dining companion from a different region.
Turkish-English mixing
- Urban restaurants blend both languages routinely
- In Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir restaurants — especially upscale or international venues — English terms are freely embedded in Turkish: 'menu', 'special', 'take-away', dish names. The switches happen without signal and remove the grammatical predictability of pure Turkish.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Turkey: the silent cost of unheard meals
Turkey's 1990 census placed the hearing-impaired population at 0.6% of total population, with more recent figures suggesting approximately 429,000 deaf individuals and an estimated 500 new children born with significant hearing impairment annually. Türk İşaret Dili (TID), Turkey's sign language, has over 200,000 signers — but for much of the twentieth century the language was officially suppressed. The government banned TID in the 1800s and maintained oralist-only education through the 1950s, leaving decades of deaf adults with no formal sign language and limited systemic support.
The 2005 Law on Disabled Individuals formally recognised TID and established a framework for disability rights including interpreter training and civil protections. But the gap between policy and daily life remains wide. Access to professional sign language interpreters outside major cities is limited, and in the noisy public settings of Turkish restaurant culture — meyhane evenings, family gatherings, wedding banquets — deaf and hard of hearing individuals continue to face significant exclusion from the social core of shared meals.
Captio AI captions Turkish conversation in real time — whether a group of friends at an Istanbul meyhane table breaks into cross-talk, or a server at an Anatolian lokantası lists the gün yemekleri faster than any lip-reader could follow.
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
"Meyhane evenings are the social centre of Istanbul and they're completely overwhelming if you can't hear. Music, overlapping conversation, fast Turkish — Captio captures all of it and I finally feel like I'm at the same table."
"Business lunches in Turkish involve very polite indirectness — the real answer is hidden in the sentence-final verb. I was missing exactly that. Captio gives me the full sentence and I understand what people actually mean."
"Black Sea Turkish sounds very different from Istanbul and even hearing people from Ankara need a moment to adjust. Captio follows the Black Sea accent accurately and I stop guessing at family dinners in Trabzon."
"Izmir café culture is constant conversation — friends meeting, debating, laughing. I used to feel outside all of it. With Captio I read the conversation in real time and I'm part of it again."
"Meyhane evenings are the social centre of Istanbul and they're completely overwhelming if you can't hear. Music, overlapping conversation, fast Turkish — Captio captures all of it and I finally feel like I'm at the same table."
"Business lunches in Turkish involve very polite indirectness — the real answer is hidden in the sentence-final verb. I was missing exactly that. Captio gives me the full sentence and I understand what people actually mean."
"Black Sea Turkish sounds very different from Istanbul and even hearing people from Ankara need a moment to adjust. Captio follows the Black Sea accent accurately and I stop guessing at family dinners in Trabzon."
"Izmir café culture is constant conversation — friends meeting, debating, laughing. I used to feel outside all of it. With Captio I read the conversation in real time and I'm part of it again."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Turkish.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store