Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Indonesian 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

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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 Soekarno-Hatta in Jakarta or Ngurah Rai in Bali, announcements come in Indonesian — often quickly and over noisy terminals. Captio AI captions every gate change and boarding call.

🚂Train stations and public transport

KRL Commuterline in Jakarta and Kereta Api Indonesia announce platforms in Indonesian. Captio AI captions ticket counter conversations and PA announcements in real time.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A hotel receptionist in Jakarta or Bali explaining check-in details and local recommendations. Captio AI captions the full exchange so you don't miss any details.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking for directions in a Jakarta street, a Yogyakarta market, or a Bali village. Indonesian with Javanese or Balinese colouring — Captio AI captions in real time.

🛃Customs and immigration

Immigration officers at Indonesian airports speak quickly in Indonesian. Captio AI captions every question so you answer accurately.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at Borobudur, Prambanan, or Komodo National Park delivering Indonesian commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow every detail of the tour.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Indonesian
91.1%

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.

Indonesian

Why Indonesian is hard to understand

Regional substrate interference

  • Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese phonemes in Indonesian
  • Over 50% of Indonesians are Javanese — and their Javanese-substrate Indonesian has distinct vowel quality and consonant realization patterns compared to the Indonesian of a Sundanese speaker from Bandung or a Batak speaker from Medan. A deaf traveler lip-reading a Jakarta hotel receptionist and a Balinese tour guide encounters two very different phonological realizations of the same standard language.

Code-switching

  • Indonesian and local languages switch without warning
  • In Bali, Javanese, Balinese, and Indonesian shift freely in the same conversation. In Sulawesi, Buginese words appear mid-sentence. A deaf traveler cannot predict which phonological system will come next — and a switch to a local language means the visible articulatory patterns change entirely without warning.

Formal vs. colloquial registers

  • Bahasa formal and bahasa gaul on the same trip
  • Standard Indonesian uses 'tidak' for negation, 'saya' for I, 'kamu' for you. Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian uses 'gak'/'nggak', 'gue'/'gw', 'lo'. A hotel receptionist in a formal setting and a taxi driver in Jakarta speak registers that look quite different on the lips — two versions of the same language that a deaf traveler must navigate within a single day.

Affixal elision in fast speech

  • Formal words collapse in natural conversation
  • In fast speech, Indonesian prefixes and suffixes are dropped and words shorten dramatically: 'mempermasalahkan' becomes 'masalahin', 'memberitahu' becomes 'bilang'. At a market stall in Yogyakarta or a busy station counter in Surabaya, the formal Indonesian a traveler prepared from might be entirely unrecognisable on the lips.

Regional accent variation

  • Batak, Sundanese, and Javanese Indonesian all differ
  • Indonesian spoken with a Batak accent from North Sumatra, a Sundanese accent from West Java, and a Javanese accent from Central Java all have distinct vowel qualities and prosody. A deaf traveler reading lips at Soekarno-Hatta in Jakarta may find the same words look different from a staff member at Ngurah Rai in Bali.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in Indonesia

Indonesia's Central Statistics Agency estimated in 2015 that almost nine million Indonesians over the age of 10 had difficulty hearing. More broadly, over 22 million Indonesians lived with a disability in 2020 — around 5% of the total population — with hearing loss among the most common categories. Indonesia's deaf community uses BISINDO (Bahasa Isyarat Indonesia), but the sign language has significant regional variation across the archipelago's provinces, and very few hearing Indonesians understand it. Only 79 deaf schools exist for over two million deaf students, and one-third of Indonesia's provinces have no school for deaf children at all.

Indonesians who have disabilities experience significant discrimination and tend to have lower access to education, health services, and employment than non-disabled people. At the travel infrastructure level, Indonesia's airports and railway stations communicate passenger information almost entirely through spoken PA announcements in Indonesian. At Soekarno-Hatta — one of the busiest airports in Southeast Asia — there is no standardised real-time visual captioning system for deaf and hard of hearing passengers. For a deaf traveler navigating the Jakarta Commuterline or a busy intercity bus terminal, critical information is available only by hearing.

Captio AI captions Indonesian speech in real time — whether a Soekarno-Hatta gate announcement, a hotel receptionist in Bali, or a customs officer at the Ngurah Rai arrivals desk — so a deaf traveler in Indonesia follows every instruction, exchange, and announcement 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

"Soekarno-Hatta announcements are in Indonesian and the terminal noise makes them even harder. Captio AI captions the gate announcement on my screen the moment it comes over the PA. I have never missed a boarding call since I started using it."

Budi S. 🇮🇩
budi.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Jakarta — frequent traveler

"Bali hotel receptionists speak Indonesian with a Balinese accent and the front desk is always busy. Captio AI captioned every word of the check-in — room number, pool hours, breakfast time. No more nodding and hoping I understood."

Dewi R. 🇮🇩
dewi.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Denpasar — tourist

"The guide at Borobudur spoke fast Javanese-inflected Indonesian. I followed perhaps a quarter of it without Captio AI. With it, I followed the complete history of the temple — the full commentary on every panel."

Agus P. 🇮🇩
agus.p***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Yogyakarta — tourist

"The Jakarta Commuterline announces stations in Indonesian. I missed my stop once because I was not watching the indicator board closely enough. Captio AI captions the announcement immediately — I get off at the right station every time now."

Sari N. 🇮🇩
sari.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Surabaya — domestic traveler

"Soekarno-Hatta announcements are in Indonesian and the terminal noise makes them even harder. Captio AI captions the gate announcement on my screen the moment it comes over the PA. I have never missed a boarding call since I started using it."

Budi S. 🇮🇩
budi.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Jakarta — frequent traveler

"Bali hotel receptionists speak Indonesian with a Balinese accent and the front desk is always busy. Captio AI captioned every word of the check-in — room number, pool hours, breakfast time. No more nodding and hoping I understood."

Dewi R. 🇮🇩
dewi.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Denpasar — tourist

"The guide at Borobudur spoke fast Javanese-inflected Indonesian. I followed perhaps a quarter of it without Captio AI. With it, I followed the complete history of the temple — the full commentary on every panel."

Agus P. 🇮🇩
agus.p***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Yogyakarta — tourist

"The Jakarta Commuterline announces stations in Indonesian. I missed my stop once because I was not watching the indicator board closely enough. Captio AI captions the announcement immediately — I get off at the right station every time now."

Sari N. 🇮🇩
sari.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Surabaya — domestic traveler

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Indonesian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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