Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

English 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

Live news, sport, and events move faster than the pre-generated subtitles that lag several seconds behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read what is being said as it is said — not a sentence behind the BBC or ITV anchor.

🎬Streaming content

Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV all vary in subtitle quality and availability. Captio AI works as a consistent fallback for any English show or film that ships with wrong, delayed, or missing captions.

📱YouTube and social media

YouTube auto-captions are often inaccurate and social media video rarely has any. Point Captio AI at your phone or laptop and read accurate captions for any English clip, on any platform.

🌍Foreign-language content

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

🎭Cinema

Not every cinema showing has open captions. Hold Captio AI near the audio and read real-time captions of the English dialogue discreetly from your seat.

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most podcasts have no transcript. Hold Captio AI near the audio or upload a recording, and read the whole English episode in writing without depending on the creator to have provided one.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

English
93.5%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

English

Why English is hard to understand

Accent diversity

  • Streaming brings every accent into your living room
  • A British drama, an American series, an Australian film, and a Nigerian documentary can all be in your watchlist. A deaf viewer who lip-reads one accent well is left behind when the next show has a completely different vowel system — and on screen you cannot ask anyone to slow down.

Dental fricatives

  • The 'th' sounds vanish on a small screen
  • English 'th' — in 'theory', 'both', 'the' — is made with the tongue between the teeth and produces almost no visible movement. On a phone or a TV across the room, where the speaker's face is small and often turned away, these common sounds disappear entirely.

Fast news and drama dialogue

  • Live speech and overlapping lines
  • News anchors read at pace, and drama dialogue overlaps as characters talk over each other. In fast, connected English — 'gonna', 'didja', 'wanna' — individual words blur together, and there is no lip to read when the camera cuts to a reaction shot.

Faces that turn away

  • The camera does not hold on the speaker
  • Film and TV constantly cut away from the person talking — to a listener, to scenery, to a voiceover narrating over pictures. A deaf viewer relying on lip-reading loses the thread every time the mouth leaves the frame, which on screen is most of the time.

Plot-critical homophones

  • One missed word can lose the story
  • In a drama, 'he's dead' and 'he's deaf', 'right' and 'write', 'their' and 'there' look identical on the lips. Miss the wrong word in a key scene and the plot no longer makes sense — and unlike a conversation, you cannot ask the screen what it just said.

Download for free

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The Challenge

Subtitles for English are everywhere — and they still fall short

The English-speaking world has some of the strongest subtitle regulation anywhere. In the UK, the Communications Act sets subtitling targets of 80% for most channels, 90% for ITV and Channel 4, and 100% for the BBC, and by 2024 more than 95% of providers offered subtitles. Yet more than 18 million adults in the UK are deaf or have hearing loss, and around 38 million Americans have significant hearing loss — an audience for whom even well-regulated subtitles routinely fail on the content they watch most.

The gaps are systematic. Live news, sport, and events rely on real-time subtitling that lags several seconds behind and degrades during fast speech. Streaming quality varies platform to platform. YouTube auto-captions are frequently wrong, social media video is usually uncaptioned, and foreign-language content and older archive material often have no accessible subtitles at all. Regulation covers broadcast television; it does not cover most of what a modern viewer actually watches.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster, the platform, or the subtitle file. Point the phone at any screen and read English captions in real time — faster than live-TV subtitles for the news, and available for the streaming, social, and foreign content that regulated subtitles never reach.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

"Netflix subtitles are often wrong or lag by several seconds, and half of YouTube has none at all. Captio AI gives me captions that match what is actually being said, in real time, for whatever I am watching."

Jonathan W. 🇺🇸
jonathan.w***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Boston

"UK broadcast subtitles are good but live news is always a few seconds behind, so the caption and the picture never match. Captio AI is right there with the anchor. For the first time the words line up with the screen."

Sarah M. 🇬🇧
sarah.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Manchester — live TV viewer

"I watch a lot of shows with different accents — American, British, Australian. Captio AI does not care which accent is on screen. It captions the drama word for word, so I finally follow the plot without pausing to guess."

Liam F. 🇮🇪
liam.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dublin — streaming viewer

"Not every cinema session is captioned here. I hold Captio AI on my knee and read the dialogue from my seat. I stopped waiting for the one captioned screening a week and just watch what I want."

Grace T. 🇦🇺
grace.t***@gmail.com
Deaf, Melbourne — cinema-goer

"Netflix subtitles are often wrong or lag by several seconds, and half of YouTube has none at all. Captio AI gives me captions that match what is actually being said, in real time, for whatever I am watching."

Jonathan W. 🇺🇸
jonathan.w***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing since childhood, Boston

"UK broadcast subtitles are good but live news is always a few seconds behind, so the caption and the picture never match. Captio AI is right there with the anchor. For the first time the words line up with the screen."

Sarah M. 🇬🇧
sarah.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Manchester — live TV viewer

"I watch a lot of shows with different accents — American, British, Australian. Captio AI does not care which accent is on screen. It captions the drama word for word, so I finally follow the plot without pausing to guess."

Liam F. 🇮🇪
liam.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dublin — streaming viewer

"Not every cinema session is captioned here. I hold Captio AI on my knee and read the dialogue from my seat. I stopped waiting for the one captioned screening a week and just watch what I want."

Grace T. 🇦🇺
grace.t***@gmail.com
Deaf, Melbourne — cinema-goer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in English.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store