Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Turkish 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 Istanbul Airport (IST), Ankara Esenboğa, or Antalya Airport, gate changes and boarding calls come in Turkish at speed. Captio AI captions every announcement so you never miss a boarding time or departure update.

🚂Train stations and public transport

TCDD intercity trains, the Marmaray, and Istanbul's Metro announce platforms and connections in Turkish. Captio AI captions ticket counter conversations and station PA in real time.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A hotel receptionist in Istanbul or Antalya explaining room details, breakfast details, and local recommendations in Turkish. Captio AI captions every word so you follow the full check-in.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking directions through Istanbul's Grand Bazaar or Cappadocia's villages. Turkish spoken fast and colloquially — Captio AI captions in real time so you understand the first time.

🛃Customs and immigration

Turkish customs and border officers speak quickly and formally. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, or Cappadocia's fairy chimneys delivering Turkish commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow every historical detail.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Turkish
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.

Turkish

Why Turkish is hard to understand

Vowel harmony across long words

  • Vowels shift throughout the word — hard to track on lips
  • Turkish vowel harmony means all vowels in a word agree in backness and rounding. In a long agglutinative word like 'gidebileceğimizden' (from the fact that we might be able to go), the vowels shift systematically across many syllables. For a deaf traveler lip-reading a Turkish customs officer or hotel receptionist, tracking vowel harmony across a long suffix chain is a demanding and often ambiguous task.

Agglutinative words

  • Single words carry what other languages say in sentences
  • Turkish builds meaning through suffixing — 'gidememişlerden' (from those who were unable to go) is a single word. At an Istanbul airport check-in counter or an Ankara hotel desk, a single Turkish word can contain tense, aspect, negation, and case — all in a continuous lip movement that a deaf traveler must try to parse as a unit.

Soft g (ğ)

  • A phoneme that produces only vowel lengthening
  • The letter ğ (yumuşak g — soft g) in Turkish produces no audible consonant — it only lengthens the preceding vowel. For a deaf traveler, ğ is simply invisible and produces no distinctive lip position. Words containing ğ — like 'dağ' (mountain), 'sağ' (right), 'yoğurt' — look as though that segment does not exist.

Regional dialect variation

  • Istanbul, Anatolian, and Black Sea Turkish all differ
  • Istanbul Turkish is the broadcast standard, but southeastern Anatolian Turkish (influenced by Kurdish and Arabic) and Black Sea Turkish (with Laz substrate sounds) differ substantially in vowel quality and phonology. A deaf traveler calibrated to Istanbul Turkish may find a hotel receptionist in Trabzon or a border officer in Gaziantep reads quite differently on the lips.

Fast speech reduction

  • Suffixes compress and vowels reduce at pace
  • In fast colloquial Turkish — the register of taxi drivers, café staff, and market vendors — vowels in unstressed syllables reduce and suffixes compress. Common phrases like 'nasılsınız' (how are you) and 'ne istiyorsunuz' (what do you want) arrive as compressed strings at travel pace that look nothing like their careful, formal equivalents.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in Turkey

Turkey has an estimated deaf population of approximately 429,000, with over 200,000 users of Türk İşaret Dili (TID — Turkish Sign Language). The country's history with deaf accessibility is marked by a long oralist tradition: TID was banned in the 19th century and remained suppressed through the 1950s, with the presumption that sign language hindered lip-reading acquisition. The Law on Disabled Individuals, passed in 2005, formally recognised TID — but decades of oralist emphasis left many deaf Turks without a fully developed sign language community and with uneven access to public services.

Turkey's travel infrastructure — including Istanbul Airport, one of the world's busiest by passenger volume, and the TCDD intercity rail network — communicates passenger information primarily through spoken Turkish PA. Accessibility provisions for deaf and hard of hearing passengers at major Turkish airports and train stations remain limited: real-time captioning at gate counters is not standardised, and hearing loop systems cover only parts of some venues. For a deaf traveler at Istanbul's 90-million-passenger-capacity airport, critical announcements — gate changes, boarding calls, delay notifications — are delivered by audio only.

Captio AI captions Turkish speech in real time — whether a gate announcement at Istanbul Airport, a TCDD station PA, or a hotel receptionist in Cappadocia — so a deaf traveler in Turkey follows every instruction and exchange without depending on audio infrastructure built without them in mind.

Download for free

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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

"Istanbul Airport is enormous and PA announcements come in Turkish very quickly. I held Captio AI near the speaker and read the gate change on screen. In an airport that size, missing a gate change is a serious problem — Captio AI made sure I didn't."

Mehmet Y. 🇹🇷
mehmet.y***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Istanbul — frequent traveler

"Turkish customs officers speak formal Turkish at a pace that leaves no room for confusion. With Captio AI I read every question before I answered. The border crossing was the least stressful part of the whole trip."

Ayşe K. 🇹🇷
ayse.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, Ankara — solo traveler

"The guide in Cappadocia spoke regional Anatolian Turkish — different from Istanbul standard. Captio AI handled it without any issue. I followed the full tour of the underground cities and fairy chimneys — every geological and historical detail."

Fatih D. 🇹🇷
fatih.d***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Cappadocia — tourist

"Hotel receptionists in Antalya speak fast Turkish. With Captio AI I followed the entire check-in — pool hours, room service, shuttle times. The first resort stay where I did not have to ask anyone to repeat anything."

Zeynep A. 🇹🇷
zeynep.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Antalya — beach traveler

"Istanbul Airport is enormous and PA announcements come in Turkish very quickly. I held Captio AI near the speaker and read the gate change on screen. In an airport that size, missing a gate change is a serious problem — Captio AI made sure I didn't."

Mehmet Y. 🇹🇷
mehmet.y***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Istanbul — frequent traveler

"Turkish customs officers speak formal Turkish at a pace that leaves no room for confusion. With Captio AI I read every question before I answered. The border crossing was the least stressful part of the whole trip."

Ayşe K. 🇹🇷
ayse.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, Ankara — solo traveler

"The guide in Cappadocia spoke regional Anatolian Turkish — different from Istanbul standard. Captio AI handled it without any issue. I followed the full tour of the underground cities and fairy chimneys — every geological and historical detail."

Fatih D. 🇹🇷
fatih.d***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Cappadocia — tourist

"Hotel receptionists in Antalya speak fast Turkish. With Captio AI I followed the entire check-in — pool hours, room service, shuttle times. The first resort stay where I did not have to ask anyone to repeat anything."

Zeynep A. 🇹🇷
zeynep.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Antalya — beach traveler

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Turkish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store