Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Vietnamese 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 or friends in Vietnam unfolds over a communal table — shared phở, bún bò Huế, or a whole grilled fish — and conversation that runs fast and overlapping throughout the meal. Following the table in real time requires captioning.
Business lunches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are frequent and important. Code-switching between Vietnamese and English happens at the business level, and a missed comment in either language can mean a misunderstood proposal.
A cà phê stop at a local Vietnamese coffee shop is a daily ritual. Orders and catch-up conversation happen in rapid Vietnamese, and the ambient noise of a busy Hội An or Sài Gòn café adds difficulty.
Travelling and eating out across Vietnam — from a Hội An hội quán to a Hà Nội bún chả spot — means navigating Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnamese, each with distinct tonal patterns. Captio AI captions whichever variety is spoken.
Group celebrations in Vietnam — Tết family dinners, graduation parties, birthday meals — are loud and joyful. Overlapping conversation around a communal table in fast Vietnamese is exactly the setting where captioning makes participation possible.
A one-on-one dinner at a quieter Hanoi restaurant carries the weight of sustained conversation in Vietnamese. Missing a tonal distinction — which can reverse a word's meaning — creates confusion 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 Vietnamese is hard to understand
Six tones invisible
- Pitch carries meaning — nothing on the lips does
- Vietnamese uses six tones (in Northern Vietnamese) that are the primary carrier of lexical meaning. The syllable 'ma' becomes 'ghost', 'but', 'mother', 'rice seedling', 'tomb', or 'horse' depending solely on pitch. These distinctions are produced by the vocal cords and are completely absent from lip movement. At a restaurant table, food names, requests, and conversation are dense with these tonal contrasts.
Northern vs Southern dialect
- Six tones collapse to five in the South
- Southern Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh City, Mekong Delta) uses five tones rather than six, merging two of the Northern distinctions. A Hanoi speaker at a southern restaurant navigates a tonal system that differs from what they learned. For a hard of hearing person, this regional tonal shift removes the last contextual predictors.
Final consonant reduction
- Syllable endings disappear in fast speech
- Vietnamese syllable structure includes final consonants (-c, -ch, -nh, -ng, -t, -p, -n, -m) that shorten or reduce in fast casual speech. At a busy restaurant, orders being taken at speed and table conversation overlapping cause these endings to be swallowed entirely.
Central dialect gap
- Huế and Đà Nẵng Vietnamese are distinct from both
- Central Vietnamese has its own tonal pattern and vowel quality that differs significantly from both the Northern and Southern standards. Restaurants across central Vietnam are served by speakers whose variety is a third system a lip-reader must navigate.
Vietnamese-English code-switching
- Urban restaurants shift languages at the menu level
- In Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi's international restaurant scenes, Vietnamese and English are mixed at the menu and service level. 'Set menu', 'chef special', 'take away' appear mid-Vietnamese sentence without signal, removing the phonological predictability of pure Vietnamese speech.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Vietnam: the cost of unheard conversations
Vietnam's national disability surveys identify approximately 1.3 million people with significant hearing impairment out of a population exceeding 97 million — with broader estimates including mild and combined hearing-speech disability reaching 2.5 million. Approximately 1,400 children are born deaf annually, and 180,000 children under 18 are estimated to have hearing loss. Data remains incomplete due to the absence of a nationwide disability registry, meaning the true burden is likely higher than official figures suggest.
Access to hearing rehabilitation and communication support is severely limited outside major cities. Schools for the deaf in Vietnam typically rely on oralist methods — teaching lip-reading and spoken Vietnamese without systematic sign language instruction — leaving many deaf graduates poorly equipped for noisy public environments. A World Bank feature story noted that Vietnamese deaf professionals regularly navigate workplaces and social settings using lip-reading as their primary tool, with no institutional captioning support.
Captio AI captions Vietnamese conversation in real time — whether friends at a Hội An restaurant share stories across a plate of cao lầu, or a colleague in a noisy Sài Gòn lunch spot mentions something that matters.
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
"Northern Vietnamese tones are everything — miss the tone and you've missed the word. At a dinner table with overlapping voices, I was always behind. Captio shows the text and I follow the conversation properly for the first time."
"Business lunches in Sài Gòn jump between Vietnamese and English constantly. I could follow one but not both without losing the thread. Captio captures both in real time."
"Central Vietnamese sounds different from Hanoi or Saigon and I grew up lip-reading the Hội An variety. Visitors from Hanoi were hard to follow. Captio handles all three dialects."
"Tết family dinners are the loudest meals of the year. Everyone talks at once and the food names alone have six possible meanings depending on the tone. Captio cuts through all of it."
"Northern Vietnamese tones are everything — miss the tone and you've missed the word. At a dinner table with overlapping voices, I was always behind. Captio shows the text and I follow the conversation properly for the first time."
"Business lunches in Sài Gòn jump between Vietnamese and English constantly. I could follow one but not both without losing the thread. Captio captures both in real time."
"Central Vietnamese sounds different from Hanoi or Saigon and I grew up lip-reading the Hội An variety. Visitors from Hanoi were hard to follow. Captio handles all three dialects."
"Tết family dinners are the loudest meals of the year. Everyone talks at once and the food names alone have six possible meanings depending on the tone. Captio cuts through all of it."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Vietnamese.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store