Urdu 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 Urdu restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Urdu 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.
A noisy karahi dinner in Lahore or a biryani lunch in Karachi — friends talking fast in colloquial Urdu, animated and overlapping. Captio AI captions each speaker in real time so a deaf diner can follow.
A business lunch at a Karachi hotel restaurant or a professional meal in Islamabad — Urdu with English mixing in, where catching every detail matters. Captio AI keeps every exchange accessible.
A chai catch-up at a Lahore café or a Karachi dhaba — quieter than a restaurant but never truly quiet. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking across the small table.
Dining at a Pakistani restaurant abroad — in London, Dubai, or New York — where waitstaff speak a mix of Urdu and English. Live Translator bridges any remaining language gap in real time.
An Eid gathering, a wedding dinner, or a family celebration at a restaurant — many people, elevated noise, conversations in parallel. Captio AI makes the celebration followable from first dish to last.
A date or lunch one-on-one where conversation matters — Urdu across a small restaurant table. Captio AI lets you follow every exchange without making the accommodation conspicuous.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
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 Urdu is hard to understand
Four-way consonant contrast
- Voiced, voiceless, aspirated, breathy — three invisible
- Urdu has a four-way consonant contrast: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced aspirated (breathy). The aspiration and breathiness are produced by airflow after the consonant closure — invisible on the lips. At a busy Lahore or Karachi restaurant table, three of the four phonation types contribute no visual information.
Retroflex consonant series
- Tongue-curled sounds hidden behind the lips
- Urdu has a full retroflex series — /ʈ/, /ɖ/, /ɳ/, /ɽ/ — produced by curling the tongue tip back to the post-alveolar region. This articulation is entirely behind the lips. Retroflex and dental minimal pairs look identical from across a restaurant table.
Uvular /q/ and /ɣ/ sounds
- Back-of-throat sounds with no lip movement
- Urdu retains the Arabic and Persian uvular /q/ and voiced uvular fricative /ɣ/ (ghayn) from its Arabic-Persian vocabulary. These sounds are produced far back in the throat, well behind the lip-reading plane. In formal Urdu and in words of Arabic origin — common in restaurant names, greetings, and social expressions — these sounds provide no visual cue.
Urdu-English code-switching
- Educated urban Urdu mixes English constantly
- In educated urban settings in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad — and across the Pakistani diaspora — Urdu-English code-switching is the default register in restaurants. English nouns, professional terms, and full sentences appear mid-Urdu without a signal. For a deaf lip-reader tracking Urdu phonology, the visual system shifts without warning.
Regional accent variation
- Punjabi, Sindhi, and Pashto accents colour Urdu differently
- Most Urdu speakers in Pakistan speak it as a second language with a regional accent — Punjabi Urdu (the most common), Sindhi-accented Urdu, Pashtun Urdu. At a restaurant table with companions from different provinces, the consonant inventory and vowel qualities shift from speaker to speaker, each presenting a different visual lip pattern.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Pakistan: the scale of daily exclusion
According to Pakistan's National Policy for Persons with Disabilities, approximately 7.4% of the population is deaf — suggesting more than 16 million deaf Pakistanis based on current population figures. In Punjab alone, the deaf population is estimated at 149,235; Sindh at 57,437. A 2023 WHO study on hearing impairment and its impact on children and parents in Pakistan documented both the prevalence of hearing loss and the significant burden it places on families, particularly in contexts where sign language and interpreter services are almost entirely absent outside formal institutions.
Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) exists but is understood by very few hearing people. Deaf Pakistanis navigating restaurants, family gatherings, and public social settings do so almost entirely without structured support. Research on hearing loss and social dining published in 2024 found that people with hearing loss disengage from restaurant dining at significantly higher rates — in a country where communal dining is a central part of social and family life, this exclusion has particular weight.
Captio AI captions Urdu conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a biryani dinner in Karachi, a family Eid gathering in Lahore, or a business lunch in Islamabad without asking others to slow down or repeat.
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
"Biryani dinner with family in Lahore — fast Punjabi-accented Urdu, everyone talking at once. Captio AI gives me the whole conversation. Family meals feel completely different now."
"Business lunches in Karachi restaurants — Urdu and English mixed, fast and professional. I used to miss the critical sentence. Captio AI changed that completely."
"At Pakistani restaurant evenings in Birmingham the conversation is Urdu, Punjabi, and English all at once. Captio AI follows the whole mix. I have not felt excluded at a family meal in months."
"The chai dhaba catch-up with old friends — fast Urdu, everyone laughing and interrupting. I used to catch every third sentence. Now I read along in real time and actually feel part of the group."
"Biryani dinner with family in Lahore — fast Punjabi-accented Urdu, everyone talking at once. Captio AI gives me the whole conversation. Family meals feel completely different now."
"Business lunches in Karachi restaurants — Urdu and English mixed, fast and professional. I used to miss the critical sentence. Captio AI changed that completely."
"At Pakistani restaurant evenings in Birmingham the conversation is Urdu, Punjabi, and English all at once. Captio AI follows the whole mix. I have not felt excluded at a family meal in months."
"The chai dhaba catch-up with old friends — fast Urdu, everyone laughing and interrupting. I used to catch every third sentence. Now I read along in real time and actually feel part of the group."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Urdu.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store