Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hebrew 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

Gate changes and boarding calls at Ben Gurion International Airport (TLV) come in Hebrew and English. Captio AI captions both languages so you catch gate numbers and boarding times without relying on the PA system.

🚂Train stations and public transport

Israel Railways (Rakevet Israel) trains announce stops in Hebrew. At the HaHagana station in Tel Aviv or the Jerusalem Yitzhak Navon station, Captio AI captions the ticket window exchange and platform PA in real time.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A hotel receptionist in Tel Aviv's Florentin neighborhood or in Jerusalem's City Center explaining check-in details and local tips in Hebrew. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow the full conversation.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking for directions near the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem or navigating Tel Aviv's bus network. Fast Hebrew from locals — Captio AI captions their reply so you find your way without confusion.

🛃Customs and immigration

Israeli border control and security officers at Ben Gurion Terminal 3 speak quickly in formal Hebrew, sometimes switching to English. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately and confidently.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at the Western Wall, Masada National Park, or Caesarea Maritime Archaeological Park delivering Hebrew commentary on Jewish and Roman history. Captio AI captions in real time so you follow every detail.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hebrew
92.5%

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.

Hebrew

Why Hebrew is hard to understand

Pharyngeal consonants in Mizrahi Hebrew

  • The pharyngeal ח and ע of Mizrahi Hebrew are produced deep in the throat — invisible
  • Mizrahi and Sephardic Modern Hebrew — widely spoken across Israel — preserves the pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ (ח) and pharyngeal approximant /ʕ/ (ע) as distinct sounds. These are produced at the pharynx with no lip or jaw movement. In Ashkenazi (General Modern Hebrew), /ʕ/ has merged with the glottal stop, but at a hotel desk in Bnei Brak, an immigration booth at Ben Gurion Terminal 3, or a market in Mahane Yehuda, a Mizrahi-accented speaker uses pharyngeal consonants throughout standard vocabulary. A deaf traveler watching their face sees nothing that maps to these phonemically distinct sounds.

General vs Mizrahi Hebrew divide

  • Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Hebrew have different phonological systems — both common at airports
  • General Modern Hebrew (primarily Ashkenazi) simplifies the guttural consonants to glottal stop or zero; Mizrahi Hebrew preserves them as full pharyngeal articulations. At Ben Gurion International Airport, immigration and airline staff may use either system. A deaf traveler calibrated to General Modern Hebrew encounters a Mizrahi-accented officer — with pharyngeal consonants at every turn — without visual warning that the phonological rules have changed.

Final stress and vowel reduction

  • Unstressed penultimate syllables reduce heavily in fast Hebrew speech
  • Modern Hebrew has default final-syllable stress. In fast natural speech — at a Tel Aviv train station, a Jerusalem bus terminal, or a hotel lobby — penultimate syllables reduce significantly: short vowels compress, sometimes approaching schwa or deleting. A deaf traveler who prepared from slower, clearer Hebrew resource recordings arrives at a real-world counter to find that common words sound — and look on the lips — shorter than what they practiced.

Arabic-Hebrew code-switching

  • Arab Israeli speakers switch between Hebrew and Arabic mid-sentence — two phonological systems at once
  • Many Arab Israeli citizens in Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth, and the Galilee are fully bilingual in Arabic and Hebrew, switching between them in natural conversation. At travel counters in Haifa Port, a hotel in Jaffa, or near the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, a staff member may begin in Hebrew and switch to Arabic mid-sentence. A deaf traveler lip-reading Hebrew suddenly encounters Arabic consonants — pharyngeals, emphatics, a completely different phonological set — with no visual transition.

Unvoweled orthography

  • Adult Hebrew text has no vowels — what you read and what you lip-read are both incomplete
  • Modern Hebrew is written without vowels (nekudot/nikkud) in adult contexts. The vowel pattern of a word is carried inside the root's consonant skeleton and must be inferred from context. A deaf traveler using lip-reading relies on seeing vowel shapes as visual cues — but a Hebrew lip-reader has no orthographic reference to confirm what vowel was spoken: neither the written sign nor the speaker's face provides the vowel unambiguously.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in Israel

Israel has a notably complex genetic profile of hereditary hearing loss: more than 20 genes have been identified as causing deafness within the Jewish-Israeli hearing-impaired population, reflecting the diverse Diaspora origins of modern Israeli society — Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jewish communities each carry different genetic hearing loss variants at population-relevant frequencies. A study on prenatal diagnosis in Israeli families found that genetic counseling and prenatal testing for hearing loss are common in both Jewish and Muslim communities, reflecting the acknowledged prevalence of hereditary deafness. Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics released population data on hearing impairment on World Hearing Day 2024, indicating a significant hearing-impaired community within the Israeli population of approximately 9.8 million.

Israel's travel infrastructure — including Ben Gurion International Airport (handling over 24 million passengers per year), Israel Railways' intercity network connecting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be'er Sheva, and the Dan and Egged bus networks across major cities — communicates critical travel information through spoken Hebrew and sometimes Arabic PA announcements. Ben Gurion's intensive security questioning process — where all passengers are interviewed before and during check-in — is conducted verbally in Hebrew or English, with no structured captioning alternative for deaf travelers. Israel's major tourist sites — the Western Wall, Masada, the Sea of Galilee, Caesarea, and Nazareth — attract millions of annual visitors; guided tours are conducted verbally without real-time captioning infrastructure.

Captio AI captions Hebrew in real time — whether a security question at Ben Gurion Terminal 3, a guide at Masada, or a platform announcement at Jerusalem's Yitzhak Navon station — so a deaf traveler in Israel follows every instruction 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

"Ben Gurion security interviews are fast Hebrew with no written alternative. I had Captio AI open and every security question appeared on screen. I answered in Hebrew without confusion — no writing back and forth, no asking for repeats."

Yosef A. 🇮🇱
yosef.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Tel Aviv — frequent Ben Gurion traveler

"Israel Railways announcements at Jerusalem Yitzhak Navon come in fast Hebrew. I pointed Captio AI at the platform speaker and the departure time and platform appeared on screen. I've stopped missing trains because I couldn't hear the change."

Rivka C. 🇮🇱
rivka.c***@gmail.com
Deaf, Jerusalem — domestic traveler

"At Haifa Port the staff switch between Hebrew and Arabic constantly. Captio AI captioned both languages without any gap. I understood the ferry departure instructions — dock number, boarding time, luggage rules — in whichever language they arrived."

Dani H. 🇮🇱
dani.h***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Haifa — traveler in mixed Hebrew-Arabic areas

"The guide at Masada spoke fast Mizrahi-accented Hebrew. I normally follow about half of any guide's commentary. With Captio AI I read the full history — Herod's palace, the Roman siege, the 960 defenders. Every sentence."

Miriam S. 🇮🇱
miriam.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Be'er Sheva — tourist

"Ben Gurion security interviews are fast Hebrew with no written alternative. I had Captio AI open and every security question appeared on screen. I answered in Hebrew without confusion — no writing back and forth, no asking for repeats."

Yosef A. 🇮🇱
yosef.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Tel Aviv — frequent Ben Gurion traveler

"Israel Railways announcements at Jerusalem Yitzhak Navon come in fast Hebrew. I pointed Captio AI at the platform speaker and the departure time and platform appeared on screen. I've stopped missing trains because I couldn't hear the change."

Rivka C. 🇮🇱
rivka.c***@gmail.com
Deaf, Jerusalem — domestic traveler

"At Haifa Port the staff switch between Hebrew and Arabic constantly. Captio AI captioned both languages without any gap. I understood the ferry departure instructions — dock number, boarding time, luggage rules — in whichever language they arrived."

Dani H. 🇮🇱
dani.h***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Haifa — traveler in mixed Hebrew-Arabic areas

"The guide at Masada spoke fast Mizrahi-accented Hebrew. I normally follow about half of any guide's commentary. With Captio AI I read the full history — Herod's palace, the Roman siege, the 960 defenders. Every sentence."

Miriam S. 🇮🇱
miriam.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Be'er Sheva — tourist

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Hebrew.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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