Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Bengali live captions and productivity tool for traveling

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

✈️Airports and boarding

At Shahjalal International in Dhaka or Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Kolkata, announcements flow in Bengali and English. Captio AI captions both languages so you never miss a boarding call or gate change.

🚂Train stations and public transport

Bangladesh Railway and West Bengal train stations announce departures in Bengali. Captio AI captions the ticket counter conversation and platform PA so you catch every platform change.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A hotel receptionist in Dhaka or Kolkata explaining check-in procedures and local recommendations in fast Bengali. Captio AI captions every word on the reception desk.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking directions in Dhaka's Gulshan or Kolkata's narrow lanes. Bengali spoken fast with local dialect colouring — Captio AI captions in real time so you understand the first time.

🛃Customs and immigration

Immigration officers at Dhaka airport speak in Bengali. Captio AI captions each question so you respond accurately and confidently.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at the Sundarbans, the Dhaka Muslin Museum, or the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata delivering Bengali commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow the full story.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Bengali
93.7%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

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Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

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.

Bengali

Why Bengali is hard to understand

Aspirated pairs

  • Six pairs of stops that look identical on the lips
  • Bengali distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated stops across six positions: /p/-/ph/, /b/-/bh/, /t/-/th/, /d/-/dh/, /k/-/kh/, /g/-/gh/. All twelve sounds produce nearly identical lip configurations. At a station counter in Dhaka or a hotel desk in Kolkata, the aspiration that separates words is invisible to a deaf traveler watching the speaker's lips.

Nasalization

  • East Bengali nasalized vowels — no lip signal
  • Eastern Bengali, spoken throughout Bangladesh, makes heavy use of nasalized vowels. Nasalization is produced at the soft palate — there is almost no visual difference at the lips between a nasal and oral vowel. A deaf traveler in Dhaka watching for key travel words sees nothing of the nasalization that carries much of the phonemic contrast.

East-West dialect divide

  • Bangladesh Bengali vs. West Bengal Bengali
  • Bangladesh Bengali (Dhaka dialect) and West Bengal Bengali (Kolkata dialect) differ substantially in vowel quality, intonation, and several phonemes. A deaf traveler lip-reading airport staff in Kolkata may find the same words look quite different from equivalent exchanges at Dhaka's Shahjalal airport.

Fast colloquial reduction

  • Word-final consonants dropped in fast speech
  • In fast colloquial Bengali — the register of taxi drivers, station ticket staff, and market vendors — word-final consonants are frequently dropped and syllables merge. The careful Bengali of a formal announcement becomes entirely different from the rapid speech of a porter at Kamalapur railway station.

Retroflex consonants

  • Tongue-back sounds invisible on the lips
  • Bengali has a full retroflex series — /ʈ/, /ɖ/, /ɳ/ — produced with the tongue curled back. Like Hindi's retroflex consonants, these are invisible at the lip level. At customs or a train station, the distinction between dental and retroflex sounds that changes word meaning is simply unreadable from a speaker's face.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in Bangladesh and West Bengal

Bangladesh carries one of the most significant hearing loss burdens in South Asia. Research published in the Journal of Laryngology and Otology estimates that approximately 9.6% of Bangladesh's population — around 13.7 million people as estimated from the 2011 census — are deaf or hard of hearing with a loss of 40 dB or more. A further 34.6% of the total population have hearing loss to some degree. Common causes include chronic suppurative otitis media, untreated middle-ear infections, and limited access to early diagnosis and hearing aids, particularly across rural areas.

Bangladesh's travel and public infrastructure offers almost no structured accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing passengers. Shahjalal International Airport and major railway termini like Kamalapur in Dhaka communicate almost entirely through spoken Bengali announcements and verbal counter exchanges. There is no national framework for real-time visual captioning at transport hubs. In India's West Bengal, access gaps are similar: despite a larger urban infrastructure, standardised in-station visual captioning does not exist, and deaf travelers must navigate busy Kolkata terminals without reliable alternatives to the PA system.

Captio AI captions Bengali speech in real time — at a Dhaka airport gate, a Kamalapur station counter, or a hotel reception in Kolkata — so a deaf traveler in Bangladesh or West Bengal follows every instruction, announcement, and question without depending on audio infrastructure built without them in mind.

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Privacy

What 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.

100% PRIVATE

Private by default

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Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Kamalapur station PA announcements are fast and the platform noise is intense. I missed my train to Chittagong once because I could not catch the platform change. Captio AI captions the announcement the moment it comes over the speaker."

Tanvir H. 🇧🇩
tanvir.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dhaka — domestic traveler

"Bengali in Kolkata sounds different from the Dhaka Bengali I grew up with. Hotel staff, auto-rickshaw drivers, ticket counters — all different varieties. Captio AI handled every one without me adjusting anything."

Rina D. 🇮🇳
rina.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, Kolkata — tourist

"Immigration officers at Shahjalal speak fast official Bengali. With Captio AI I read every question on my screen before I answer. The border crossing is no longer guesswork."

Kabir C. 🇧🇩
kabir.c***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Dhaka — business traveler

"The Victoria Memorial guide spoke educated Kolkata Bengali very quickly. I followed maybe a third of it normally. With Captio AI I followed the full tour — every historical detail, every story behind the exhibits."

Priti S. 🇮🇳
priti.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Kolkata — museum visitor

"Kamalapur station PA announcements are fast and the platform noise is intense. I missed my train to Chittagong once because I could not catch the platform change. Captio AI captions the announcement the moment it comes over the speaker."

Tanvir H. 🇧🇩
tanvir.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dhaka — domestic traveler

"Bengali in Kolkata sounds different from the Dhaka Bengali I grew up with. Hotel staff, auto-rickshaw drivers, ticket counters — all different varieties. Captio AI handled every one without me adjusting anything."

Rina D. 🇮🇳
rina.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, Kolkata — tourist

"Immigration officers at Shahjalal speak fast official Bengali. With Captio AI I read every question on my screen before I answer. The border crossing is no longer guesswork."

Kabir C. 🇧🇩
kabir.c***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Dhaka — business traveler

"The Victoria Memorial guide spoke educated Kolkata Bengali very quickly. I followed maybe a third of it normally. With Captio AI I followed the full tour — every historical detail, every story behind the exhibits."

Priti S. 🇮🇳
priti.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Kolkata — museum visitor

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Bengali.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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