Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Catalan live captions and productivity tool for traveling

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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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 Barcelona El Prat or Palma de Mallorca, gate changes and boarding calls come in Catalan and Spanish across echoing terminals. Captio AI captions both languages so you catch every gate number and boarding time.

🚂Train stations and public transport

Rodalies regional trains and Barcelona's TMB metro announce platforms and delays in Catalan. Captio AI captions the ticket-window exchange and the platform PA in real time so you never miss a connection.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A receptionist in Barcelona's Eixample or a guesthouse in Girona explaining check-in, breakfast, and the walk to the beach in Catalan. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow the whole conversation.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking the way through Barcelona's Gothic Quarter or a village in the Empordà. Fast Catalan from a passer-by — Captio AI captions the reply so you take the right turning the first time.

🛃Customs and immigration

Border and customs officers at Catalan airports speak quickly and switch between Catalan and Spanish. Captio AI captions every question so you answer accurately and confidently.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at the Sagrada Família, Montserrat, or the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres delivering Catalan commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow the full story behind each site.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Catalan
89.3%

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.

Catalan

Why Catalan is hard to understand

Eastern vowel reduction

  • Unstressed vowels collapse into a neutral schwa
  • Central Catalan — the variety spoken across Barcelona and the coast — reduces unstressed /a/ and /e/ to a neutral schwa and unstressed /o/ to /u/. Words look nothing like they are written. At El Prat's check-in desk or a Barcelona hotel counter, the unstressed vowels that a lip-reader relies on to segment a word simply flatten into one shape.

Valencian–Balearic split

  • The same language, three different mouths
  • Valencian keeps its unstressed vowels full and sounds noticeably more Castilian; Balearic Catalan (Mallorca, Menorca, Eivissa) has a stressed schwa found in no other variety. A deaf traveler calibrated to Barcelona Catalan meets a Palma receptionist or a Valencia gate agent and finds the same words carry completely different lip shapes.

Final consonants and dark l

  • Word endings that carry grammar disappear
  • Catalan devoices final consonants, permits heavy final clusters, and uses a dark, velarised l. The endings that mark plural, tense, and gender land at the back of the mouth or drop out of view entirely. At a customs counter a whole grammatical distinction can ride on a final consonant a lip-reader never sees.

Catalan–Spanish code-switching

  • Two languages inside one sentence
  • Bilingual Catalonia switches between Catalan and Castilian without warning. A receptionist can open in Catalan, drop into Spanish for a room number or a price, and return to Catalan mid-sentence. A deaf traveler reading lips must jump between two phonological systems with no visual signal that the language just changed.

Fast connected speech

  • Casual Catalan links and swallows syllables
  • In relaxed speech, Catalan links words across boundaries and lets the neutral schwa swallow whole syllables. At a busy Boqueria market stall or on a crowded metro platform, the careful enunciation that helps lip-reading vanishes into a continuous stream.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in Catalonia

According to Spain's National Statistics Institute, 1,064,000 people in Spain are deaf or have a hearing disability — around 2.3% of the population — and a more recent EuroTrak survey puts the number living with some degree of hearing loss at roughly one in ten, close to five million people. In Catalonia specifically, there are an estimated 25,000 users of Catalan Sign Language (LSC), of whom around 12,000 are deaf signers. These are the travelers navigating Barcelona's transit hubs, and fewer than 40% of Spaniards with hearing loss use a hearing aid.

Catalonia was the first Spanish autonomous community to give its sign language legal status, recognising LSC in 1994. Yet legal recognition has not reached the transport network. Barcelona El Prat is Spain's second-busiest airport, handling over 50 million passengers a year, and it — like the Rodalies rail network and the TMB metro — runs on spoken PA announcements with no standardised real-time visual captioning at gates and counters. Visual boards do not replicate every announcement, and staffed captioning at service desks is effectively absent. For a deaf traveler, the system still assumes the passenger can hear.

Captio AI captions Catalan in real time — a gate change at El Prat, a Rodalies platform announcement, a hotel receptionist in Girona — so a deaf traveler in Catalonia follows every instruction and exchange without depending on 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

"El Prat announcements come in Catalan and Spanish and the terminal echo is brutal. I used to stare at the board hoping I had not missed a gate change. Captio AI near the speaker showed the new gate on my screen straight away. No more sprinting on a guess."

Jordi P. 🇪🇸
jordi.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Barcelona — frequent traveler

"Mallorcan Catalan has that stressed schwa you do not hear on the mainland, and I could never lip-read the hotel staff here. Captio AI captioned the whole check-in — room, breakfast, the walk to the cove — in Balearic Catalan without me adjusting anything."

Montse R. 🇪🇸
montse.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Palma de Mallorca — island traveler

"The Rodalies platform PA switches from Catalan to Spanish and back. I missed a regional train to Figueres once because the delay announcement was only spoken. Captio AI captions both languages the moment they come over the speaker. I catch every change now."

Núria B. 🇪🇸
nuria.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Girona — Rodalies commuter

"The Montserrat guide spoke fast Catalan describing the abbey and the rock formations. I would normally catch a third of it. With Captio AI I read the whole commentary — the Black Madonna, the funicular, the boys' choir — word for word."

Marc T. 🇦🇩
marc.t***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Andorra la Vella — mountain traveler

"El Prat announcements come in Catalan and Spanish and the terminal echo is brutal. I used to stare at the board hoping I had not missed a gate change. Captio AI near the speaker showed the new gate on my screen straight away. No more sprinting on a guess."

Jordi P. 🇪🇸
jordi.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Barcelona — frequent traveler

"Mallorcan Catalan has that stressed schwa you do not hear on the mainland, and I could never lip-read the hotel staff here. Captio AI captioned the whole check-in — room, breakfast, the walk to the cove — in Balearic Catalan without me adjusting anything."

Montse R. 🇪🇸
montse.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Palma de Mallorca — island traveler

"The Rodalies platform PA switches from Catalan to Spanish and back. I missed a regional train to Figueres once because the delay announcement was only spoken. Captio AI captions both languages the moment they come over the speaker. I catch every change now."

Núria B. 🇪🇸
nuria.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Girona — Rodalies commuter

"The Montserrat guide spoke fast Catalan describing the abbey and the rock formations. I would normally catch a third of it. With Captio AI I read the whole commentary — the Black Madonna, the funicular, the boys' choir — word for word."

Marc T. 🇦🇩
marc.t***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Andorra la Vella — mountain traveler

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Catalan.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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