Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Arabic live captions and productivity tool for tv & media

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

📺Live TV — news, sport, events

Al Jazeera and other broadcasters run live news that pre-generated captions lag behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read the Arabic as it is spoken, not several seconds behind the anchor.

🎬Streaming content

Shahid, OSN, and other platforms vary in subtitle quality and availability. Captio AI works as a consistent fallback for any Arabic drama or film that ships with wrong, delayed, or missing captions.

📱YouTube and social media

YouTube auto-captions for Arabic are often inaccurate and most social video has none. Point Captio AI at your phone and read accurate Arabic captions for any clip.

🌍Foreign-language content

A foreign film, a foreign documentary, a non-Arabic channel. Live Translator captions and translates in real time so anything becomes watchable in Arabic as it plays.

🎭Cinema

Not every cinema showing is captioned. Hold Captio AI near the audio and read real-time Arabic captions of the dialogue discreetly from your seat.

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Arabic podcasts have no transcript. Hold Captio AI near the audio or upload a recording, and read the whole episode in writing.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Arabic
83.8%

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 the content that subtitles fail

Captions any content in real time

Point the phone toward any speaker — TV, laptop, tablet, cinema screen. Captio AI captions whatever is playing, regardless of whether that platform provides subtitles.

Faster than built-in subtitles for live content

Pre-generated subtitles lag behind live TV by several seconds. Captio AI captions in real time — so you read what is being said as it is being said.

Works on any screen or device

No integration required. Point the phone toward the audio source — the same approach works for a large TV, a laptop screen, a cinema, or a phone held at arm's length.

Any language, translated in real time

For foreign-language content, switch to Live Translator. It translates as content plays — so a French film, a German documentary, or a Japanese series all become watchable.

No subtitle file needed

Captio AI captions from the audio directly. No subtitle file, no platform support, no creator requirement. If audio plays, Captio AI can caption it.

More accurate than auto-generated captions

The industry average for AI-generated subtitles is a 10–15% word error rate — roughly 1 in 10 words wrong (3Play Media). Captio AI is built for accuracy in real-world audio conditions.

Arabic

Why Arabic is hard to understand

Diglossia on screen

  • Formal MSA in the news, dialect in the drama
  • Arabic news and formal programming use Modern Standard Arabic, while dramas, comedy, and talk shows use regional dialect — Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine. A deaf viewer must follow two very different varieties across a single evening's viewing, and neither is easy to read on a small screen.

Pharyngeal consonants

  • Sounds made deep in the throat, invisible on the lips
  • Arabic ħ (ح) and ʕ (ع) are produced deep in the throat and give almost no lip cue. On a TV drama or a news read, a deaf viewer sees nothing of these consonants, yet they distinguish common words that carry the meaning of a scene.

Emphatic consonants

  • Pharyngealised pairs that look identical
  • Arabic contrasts plain and emphatic consonants — s/sˤ, d/dˤ, t/tˤ — and the difference is a tongue-root gesture invisible at the lips. Two words that differ only in emphasis look the same on a presenter's mouth, so a technical or plot-critical distinction is lost on screen.

Dialect diversity across channels

  • Four spoken Arabics stream side by side
  • Pan-Arab television and streaming put Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine, and Maghrebi content on the same platform. These varieties differ enough that even fluent speakers struggle across them, so a deaf viewer faces a new lip-reading challenge with every show.

Dubbing and mismatched lips

  • Dubbed drama and foreign content the mouth does not match
  • Foreign series dubbed into Arabic, and Turkish dramas dubbed into Levantine or MSA, leave the words a viewer hears out of sync with the lips on screen. For a deaf viewer relying on lip-reading, dubbed content is impossible to follow from the face alone.

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The Challenge

Arabic subtitling for deaf viewers is still an underdeveloped field

Across the Arab world, around 90% of people with disabling hearing loss live in low- and middle-income countries, and audiological support is concentrated in capital cities. Media accessibility lags with it: researchers describe subtitling for deaf and hard of hearing viewers in the Arab world as an underdeveloped field, with the volume of dedicated deaf-and-hard-of-hearing subtitling well behind other regions.

The problem is not only volume but consistency. Unlike English, Arabic subtitling for deaf viewers lacks agreed norms for how captions are constructed and formatted, producing gaps and uneven information on screen — and much of what is captioned uses formal Modern Standard Arabic even when the dialogue is in dialect. Streaming platforms have begun subtitling some Arabic films, but live news, dialect drama, dubbed foreign series, and social video remain largely inaccessible to a deaf viewer.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live Al Jazeera bulletin, a Gulf drama, a dubbed Turkish series — and read Arabic captions in real time, in the dialect actually being spoken, whether or not that content was ever captioned.

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

"Gulf dramas rarely have captions for us, and the dialect is nothing like the MSA on the news. Captio AI captions the dialect actually being spoken, from the audio. I finally follow the shows everyone else is talking about."

Youssef A. 🇦🇪
youssef.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dubai — drama viewer

"Dubbed Turkish series are impossible to lip-read — the mouth is Turkish, the sound is Arabic. Captio AI captions the Arabic soundtrack. For the first time I can watch the dubbed dramas with my family and keep up."

Rania H. 🇪🇬
rania.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, Cairo — Turkish-drama fan

"Al Jazeera live news has the throat sounds I cannot see and no captions that match the picture. Captio AI captions the MSA in real time. I read the news as it is read, not a summary later."

Khalid S. 🇸🇦
khalid.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Riyadh — live news viewer

"Levantine YouTube has no captions and mixes in French. Captio AI captions all of it accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms never do."

Nour F. 🇱🇧
nour.f***@gmail.com
Deaf, Beirut — YouTube viewer

"Gulf dramas rarely have captions for us, and the dialect is nothing like the MSA on the news. Captio AI captions the dialect actually being spoken, from the audio. I finally follow the shows everyone else is talking about."

Youssef A. 🇦🇪
youssef.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dubai — drama viewer

"Dubbed Turkish series are impossible to lip-read — the mouth is Turkish, the sound is Arabic. Captio AI captions the Arabic soundtrack. For the first time I can watch the dubbed dramas with my family and keep up."

Rania H. 🇪🇬
rania.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, Cairo — Turkish-drama fan

"Al Jazeera live news has the throat sounds I cannot see and no captions that match the picture. Captio AI captions the MSA in real time. I read the news as it is read, not a summary later."

Khalid S. 🇸🇦
khalid.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Riyadh — live news viewer

"Levantine YouTube has no captions and mixes in French. Captio AI captions all of it accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms never do."

Nour F. 🇱🇧
nour.f***@gmail.com
Deaf, Beirut — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Arabic.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store