Basque live captions and productivity tool for tv & media
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Basque tv & media
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Basque speakers.
Captions anything playing in real time
- Point the phone toward the speaker and read along
- Works on any TV, laptop, tablet, or phone
- No subtitle file required — captions from the audio directly
- Faster than pre-generated subtitles for live content
Watch content in any language
- Foreign films, foreign news, foreign YouTube — all translated in real time
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- 60+ languages, no setup
- Works as content plays
Full transcript of any recording
- Upload a recording and get the complete written transcript
- For lectures, podcasts, talks, or any long-form content
- Searchable and copyable
- Any language, any format
Key points from any content
- Main ideas and takeaways from any transcript
- Useful for news, documentaries, and long-form content
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Live TV in Basque moves fast — an ETB news bulletin, an Athletic match, a bertsolaritza contest broadcast. Point Captio AI at the screen and read the commentary and reporting in real time as it happens.
Streaming catalogues carry little Basque content and rarely caption it for the deaf. Captio AI captions a series or film from the audio, so you follow the dialogue whether or not the platform provides Basque subtitles.
Basque YouTube and social clips — creators from Bilbao, Donostia, and Gasteiz — rarely carry reliable captions. Point Captio AI at the speaker and read every word.
Foreign films reach Basque screens dubbed or subtitled in Spanish. Captio AI captions the Basque audio track in real time, so you are not left choosing between a soundtrack you cannot hear and subtitles in another language.
In a Bilbao cinema showing a Basque film, hold your phone toward the audio and read the dialogue as the scene plays.
Basque podcasts and radio — news, culture, traditional music talk — arrive as audio only. Upload a recording to Captio AI and read the full conversation as text.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
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.
Why Basque is hard to understand
Unrelated grammar
- A language built unlike its neighbours
- Basque is unrelated to Spanish, French, or any other language, and it marks who did what with an ergative case and long strings of suffixes on the ends of words. A deaf viewer cannot fall back on familiar patterns, and the crucial endings sit at the tail of the word where lip-reading is weakest.
Palatalization
- Softened sounds formed out of sight
- Basque uses palatalized consonants — a soft ll, tt, and the sounds written x and tx — made with the tongue against the palate. That movement is hidden inside the mouth, so a deaf viewer watching a presenter cannot tell these apart from their plain counterparts.
Dialect distance
- Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan, and beyond diverge sharply
- Basque dialects differ enough that speakers from different provinces can struggle to understand each other, and standard Batua on the news is different again. A deaf viewer calibrated to one variety meets a markedly different sound and vocabulary in another.
Basque–Spanish mixing
- Speakers slide between Basque and Spanish
- Many speakers move between Basque and Spanish — and Basque and French across the border — within a single conversation on air. The switch is instant and invisible on the lips, so a deaf viewer cannot tell which language a guest has just moved into.
Fast delivery
- Presenters run the suffixes together
- In a live bulletin or a chat show the delivery is fast and the long suffixed words blur together. On screen there is no chance to slow a presenter down, so a deaf viewer following the lips loses the endings that carry the grammar.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreThe scale of the challenge
Around one in ten people in Spain live with hearing loss — roughly five million people according to EuroTrak — and the national disability survey counted over a million with a hearing disability. Across the Basque Country and Navarre, that share of the population is a large body of viewers who depend on what appears on screen rather than on what they can hear.
For Basque the media-access gap is unusually stark. Research on ETB, the Basque public broadcaster, has found that no live or semi-live subtitling is offered in Basque at all — the sole routine exception being the pre-recorded weather segment, which carries unedited automatic subtitles. Engineers have had to build Basque speech-to-text systems from the ground up, because a language unrelated to any other simply is not covered by the tools made for major languages.
The result is a Basque viewer whose own language is the least captioned option on the screen — pushed toward Spanish subtitles on foreign content and left with almost nothing live in Basque. Captio AI closes that gap: point the phone at any screen — an ETB news bulletin, a streaming series, an Athletic match — and read Basque captions in real time from the audio, whatever the channel and whether or not the content was captioned.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"ETB barely subtitles anything live in Basque. Captio AI captions the audio in real time, on any programme. I stopped switching to the Spanish channel just to read along."
"Foreign films only offer Spanish subtitles and the Basque track has none. Captio AI captions the Basque audio directly. I watch in my own language now."
"Live commentary runs fast and the long suffixes blur on the lips. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words match the play."
"A Bizkaian speaker sounds different from the Batua on the news and I lose the words. Captio AI captions whatever dialect a show uses. It covers exactly what the channels leave out."
"ETB barely subtitles anything live in Basque. Captio AI captions the audio in real time, on any programme. I stopped switching to the Spanish channel just to read along."
"Foreign films only offer Spanish subtitles and the Basque track has none. Captio AI captions the Basque audio directly. I watch in my own language now."
"Live commentary runs fast and the long suffixes blur on the lips. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words match the play."
"A Bizkaian speaker sounds different from the Batua on the news and I lose the words. Captio AI captions whatever dialect a show uses. It covers exactly what the channels leave out."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Watch anything in Basque.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store