Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Korean 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 Incheon International Airport or Gimpo, gate changes and boarding calls come in Korean at speed. Captio AI captions every announcement so you never miss a boarding call or gate change.

🚂Train stations and public transport

KTX high-speed rail and Seoul Metro announce platforms and stations in Korean. Captio AI captions ticket counter conversations and station PA in real time — so you get off at the right stop.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A hotel receptionist in Seoul or Busan explaining room details, check-in procedures, and local recommendations in Korean. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow every word without asking for repeats.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking for directions in Seoul's Hongdae or finding your way through Myeongdong's streets. Fast Korean — Captio AI captions in real time so you understand the first time.

🛃Customs and immigration

Korean immigration and customs officers at Incheon speak formally and precisely. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately and confidently.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at Gyeongbokgung Palace, the DMZ, or Jeju Island delivering Korean commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow every detail of the tour.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Korean
95.7%

character 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.

Korean

Why Korean is hard to understand

Three-way consonant distinction

  • Lax, aspirated, and tensed — all look identical on the lips
  • Korean distinguishes three categories of stops: lax (ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ), aspirated (ㅍ, ㅌ, ㅋ), and tensed/fortis (ㅃ, ㄸ, ㄲ). The tensed consonants are produced with extra laryngeal tension — an entirely acoustic distinction. At an Incheon gate counter or a Seoul hotel desk, these three-way contrasts produce virtually identical lip shapes. A deaf traveler watching a Korean customs officer's lips cannot distinguish lax from aspirated from tensed stops.

Final consonant neutralisation

  • All word-final stops reduce to unreleased closures
  • Korean word-final stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) are unreleased — the closure is made but no burst follows. At a KTX ticket window or an immigration desk, the word endings that carry meaning arrive as a silent closure on the lips that produces no visible burst. A deaf traveler sees the mouth close on a final consonant and receives no visual confirmation of which stop it was.

Gyeongsang pitch accent

  • The Busan and Daegu dialect has lexical pitch
  • Standard Seoul Korean has no lexical tone, but the Gyeongsang dialects (Busan, Daegu, Ulsan) have a pitch accent system where word pairs differ only by pitch. A deaf traveler who has calibrated to Seoul Korean arrives in Busan to find hotel staff, taxi drivers, and station workers using pitch distinctions that carry meaning — and are entirely invisible on the lips.

Consonant assimilation at word boundaries

  • Final consonants change in connected speech
  • In Korean connected speech, final consonants assimilate to the initial consonant of the following syllable — a process called 연음 (yeonaeum) and 음운변동 (phonological change). 'Hanguk mal' (Korean language) is pronounced 'hangungmal'. These boundary changes mean a deaf traveler reading lips finds the words they expect to look different in natural connected speech.

Fast Seoul speech

  • Informal fast speech compresses vowels and consonants
  • In fast informal Korean — the register of airport staff, hotel check-in counters, and taxi drivers — vowels reduce and some consonant distinctions compress. Common phrases like '괜찮아요' (it's okay) and '어떻게 도와드릴까요' (how can I help you) arrive at a pace where even a hearing learner struggles to segment individual words, let alone a deaf traveler parsing from lips alone.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in South Korea

South Korea has a well-documented and growing hearing loss burden. According to the APAC Trak KoreaTrak 2024 survey, approximately 5.3% of the total Korean population report having hearing loss — around 2.7 million people. The number of registered persons with disabilities in South Korea surpassed 2.63 million in 2024, with hearing impairment accounting for 16.8% of all registered disabilities. Significantly, in 2024, hearing impairment was the most common newly registered disability type at 31.7% of new registrations — a figure that reflects both ageing demographics and increasing awareness of hearing health.

South Korea has a relatively well-developed disability policy for hearing loss: the National Health Insurance has subsidised hearing aids since 1989, with subsidies increased to approximately US$1,000 in 2015. However, Korea's travel infrastructure — Incheon International Airport, the KTX network, and Seoul's extensive metro system — still relies heavily on spoken PA for critical passenger information. While visual information boards exist at major KTX stations and metro lines, short-notice announcements (platform changes, delays, service disruptions) are delivered by spoken PA and may not appear simultaneously on visual displays. For deaf and hard of hearing travelers at Incheon or Seoul Station, the spoken announcement remains the primary channel.

Captio AI captions Korean speech in real time — whether a KTX platform PA, an immigration officer at Incheon, or a hotel receptionist in Seoul — so a deaf traveler in South Korea follows every instruction and exchange 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

"KTX station PA at Seoul Station comes fast and the hall is enormous. Captio AI captions the platform number and change on my screen the moment the announcement begins. I have never stood at the wrong platform since."

Ji-Young K. 🇰🇷
jiyoung.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Seoul — frequent traveler

"Busan dialect is very different from Seoul Korean. Hotel staff and taxi drivers in Busan use a pitch accent that I cannot follow at all on lips. Captio AI captures all of it — the check-in, the directions to Haeundae Beach, the restaurant recommendation."

Min-Jun L. 🇰🇷
minjun.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, Busan — solo traveler

"Incheon immigration officers speak fast formal Korean. I pointed Captio AI at the officer and read every question on screen. I answered correctly and confidently. The immigration queue is no longer the part of the trip I dread."

Soo-Jin P. 🇰🇷
soojin.p***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Seoul — tourist

"The guide at Bulguksa Temple spoke formal Seoul Korean at a steady pace. Captio AI captured every word — the history of the Silla Kingdom, the symbolism of each structure. The most complete temple tour I have ever had."

Hyun-Woo C. 🇰🇷
hyunwoo.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Gyeongju — tourist

"KTX station PA at Seoul Station comes fast and the hall is enormous. Captio AI captions the platform number and change on my screen the moment the announcement begins. I have never stood at the wrong platform since."

Ji-Young K. 🇰🇷
jiyoung.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Seoul — frequent traveler

"Busan dialect is very different from Seoul Korean. Hotel staff and taxi drivers in Busan use a pitch accent that I cannot follow at all on lips. Captio AI captures all of it — the check-in, the directions to Haeundae Beach, the restaurant recommendation."

Min-Jun L. 🇰🇷
minjun.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, Busan — solo traveler

"Incheon immigration officers speak fast formal Korean. I pointed Captio AI at the officer and read every question on screen. I answered correctly and confidently. The immigration queue is no longer the part of the trip I dread."

Soo-Jin P. 🇰🇷
soojin.p***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Seoul — tourist

"The guide at Bulguksa Temple spoke formal Seoul Korean at a steady pace. Captio AI captured every word — the history of the Silla Kingdom, the symbolism of each structure. The most complete temple tour I have ever had."

Hyun-Woo C. 🇰🇷
hyunwoo.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Gyeongju — tourist

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Korean.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store