Basque live captions and productivity tool for traveling
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Basque traveling
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Basque speakers.
Captions any spoken exchange, anywhere
- Airport staff, hotel receptionists, taxi drivers
- Real time, word by word, as they speak
- Works through travel noise and accents
- No setup — open the app and point it
No language barrier, anywhere in the world
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- 60+ languages, no manual switching
- For customs, hotels, restaurants, and local transport
- Translates in real time as they speak
Transcribe any recorded content
- Record a tour guide, a briefing, an important exchange
- Upload and get the full transcript to review
- Any language, any format
- Useful for travel information you want in writing
Key travel information extracted
- Instructions, directions, and key details from any transcript
- Organised into clear sections
- Useful after complex hotel check-ins or guided briefings
- 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.
At Bilbao Airport (BIO) or San Sebastián, gate changes and boarding calls come in Basque and Spanish. Captio AI captions both languages so you catch every gate number and boarding time.
Euskotren and Renfe services and Bilbao's metro announce stops in Basque and Spanish. Captio AI captions the ticket-counter exchange and the platform PA in real time so you board the right service.
A receptionist in San Sebastián's old town or a guesthouse in Bilbao explaining check-in, pintxo bars, and the way to the beach in Basque. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow every word.
Asking the way through Bilbao's Casco Viejo or a village in the Basque hills. Fast Basque from a local — Captio AI captions the reply so you find the route the first time.
Border and customs officers where the Basque Country straddles Spain and France speak quickly, switching between Basque, Spanish, and French. Captio AI captions every question so you answer accurately.
A guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the old town of San Sebastián, or the Gaztelugatxe headland delivering Basque commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow the full story.
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 a world that announces everything by sound
Captions any spoken exchange in real time
Airport staff, hotel receptionists, taxi drivers, tour guides. Hold the phone toward whoever is speaking and read the captions — in any setting, in any country.
60+ languages — no language barrier
Live Translator captions and translates in real time. They speak their language — you read in yours. For every country, every language, no manual setup between interactions.
Works anywhere with a data connection
Wi-Fi or mobile data. A local SIM or roaming plan keeps Captio AI running in any country — airports, hotels, rural areas, and everywhere in between.
Handles travel environments
Noisy airports, busy stations, echoing hotel lobbies. Captio AI is built for real environments — not quiet controlled rooms. It captions through the ambient noise of travel.
Discreet in any public setting
Hold the phone or place it near the speaker. Captio AI runs quietly and draws no attention — useful in customs, immigration, and any formal travel interaction where discretion matters.
Private by default
Travel conversations — customs declarations, hotel bookings, personal exchanges — are never stored or shared. Audio is processed in real time and discarded immediately.
Why Basque is hard to understand
Sibilant contrasts
- Three s-sounds and two ts-sounds that look alike
- Basque distinguishes sibilants that most other European languages merge — the s-sounds written z, s, and x, and the affricates tz and ts — made at slightly different points with the tongue. To a lip-reader they look almost identical, yet they separate different words. At a San Sebastián counter, the difference between two words can ride entirely on a sibilant the mouth does not reveal.
Dialect diversity
- Several dialects across a small territory
- Basque divides into dialects — Biscayan, Gipuzkoan, Upper Navarrese, and the Lapurdian and Souletin varieties across the French border — that differ enough to challenge mutual understanding. Biscayan around Bilbao has its own verb forms and sound changes. A deaf traveler moving from Bilbao to San Sebastián to the French Basque coast meets shifting speech on the lips.
Ergative structure
- Word endings do the grammatical work
- Basque is ergative: who does what to whom is marked by endings on the words — the ergative -k and a chain of case suffixes — rather than by word order. A great deal of meaning is packed into these endings at the ends of words, exactly where fast speech clips them and lip-reading is hardest.
Basque–Spanish–French code-switching
- Two state languages mixed with Basque
- In the Spanish Basque Country speakers blend Basque and Castilian; across the border they blend Basque and French. A hotel receptionist or a station clerk can switch language mid-sentence without any visual cue, forcing a deaf traveler to track two phonological systems at once.
Unfamiliar word shapes
- A non-Indo-European language with no cognate footholds
- Basque is unrelated to the Romance languages around it, so its words share no roots a traveler could guess from. Where a lip-reader might fill a gap in Spanish or French from a familiar-looking word, Basque offers no such foothold — every missed sound is a word that cannot be reconstructed from context.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss and travel accessibility in the Basque Country
Spain has 1,064,000 people who are deaf or have a hearing disability according to the National Statistics Institute — about 2.3% of the population — while more recent EuroTrak data puts the number living with some degree of hearing loss at roughly one in ten, close to five million people. The Basque Country carries its share of this, spread across the Spanish provinces of Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and Araba and the French Basque territory. Across Spain, fewer than 40% of people with hearing loss use a hearing aid, leaving a large group navigating public life — and travel — on unaided hearing.
The Basque Country is one of the more research-active regions for language accessibility — the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language studies sign-language processing, and researchers have built systems to translate Basque into Spanish Sign Language. But that expertise has not reached the transport network. Bilbao and San Sebastián airports, the Euskotren and Renfe rail services, and the Bilbao metro run on spoken announcements in Basque and Spanish, with no standardised real-time captioning at gates and counters, and the region's tourist icons — the Guggenheim, the pintxo bars of the old towns, the coastal paths — are experienced largely through the spoken word.
Captio AI captions Basque in real time — a boarding call at Bilbao Airport, a Euskotren platform announcement, a hotel check-in in San Sebastián's old town — so a deaf traveler in the Basque Country follows every change and question without depending on infrastructure built without them in mind.
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
"Bilbao Airport calls come in Basque and Spanish and the sibilants in Basque are impossible for me to lip-read — the z, s, and x all look the same on the mouth. Captio AI captioned the gate change on my screen. I read it and went straight to the gate."
"Guesthouse hosts here switch between Basque and Spanish mid-sentence and I lose the thread completely. Captio AI captioned the whole check-in in both languages — the room, the pintxo bars, the walk to La Concha — without me having to guess which language was which."
"Euskotren announces stops in Basque first and it goes fast. Because Basque words share no roots with Spanish, if I miss a sound I cannot guess the rest. Captio AI captions the stop name in full so I always know when to get off."
"On the French side people blend Basque and French, and the border crossing questions came fast in both. Captio AI captioned every question at the crossing. For the first time I answered the officer without that panic of not knowing what was asked."
"Bilbao Airport calls come in Basque and Spanish and the sibilants in Basque are impossible for me to lip-read — the z, s, and x all look the same on the mouth. Captio AI captioned the gate change on my screen. I read it and went straight to the gate."
"Guesthouse hosts here switch between Basque and Spanish mid-sentence and I lose the thread completely. Captio AI captioned the whole check-in in both languages — the room, the pintxo bars, the walk to La Concha — without me having to guess which language was which."
"Euskotren announces stops in Basque first and it goes fast. Because Basque words share no roots with Spanish, if I miss a sound I cannot guess the rest. Captio AI captions the stop name in full so I always know when to get off."
"On the French side people blend Basque and French, and the border crossing questions came fast in both. Captio AI captioned every question at the crossing. For the first time I answered the officer without that panic of not knowing what was asked."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Navigate confidently in Basque.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store