Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Finnish 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

Yle and MTV3 run live news that pre-generated subtitles can lag behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read the Finnish as it is spoken, not several seconds behind the anchor.

🎬Streaming content

Yle Areena, MTV Katsomo, and Netflix vary in subtitle quality — commercial channels carry far less deaf subtitling than Yle. Captio AI works as a consistent fallback for any Finnish show or film.

📱YouTube and social media

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

🌍Foreign-language content

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

🎭Cinema

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

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Finnish 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

Finnish
89.4%

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.

Finnish

Why Finnish is hard to understand

Long vowels and gemination

  • Length that changes the word — in vowels and consonants
  • Finnish contrasts short and long sounds for both vowels and consonants — 'tuli', 'tuuli', and 'tulli' are three different words. These are timing distinctions, not lip shapes, so on screen a deaf viewer cannot see which of several similar-looking terms was said.

Consonant gradation

  • The same root's consonants change between forms
  • Finnish consonants alternate between a strong and a weak grade as a word inflects — p, t, k weaken or double depending on the ending. A deaf viewer tracking a word sees its consonants change shape from one form to the next, so the same root looks different through a scene.

Vowel harmony

  • Suffix vowels that shift to match the root
  • Finnish suffixes harmonise their vowels with the root. These unstressed suffix vowels carry grammar at the ends of long words, and in fast dialogue they weaken and blur, exactly where a deaf viewer needs them to follow the sentence.

Agglutination and case

  • Long words with meaning stacked on the end
  • Finnish glues many suffixes onto a root and marks around fifteen cases, so where you are going, coming from, or staying is encoded in endings at the far end of a long word. In fast dialogue those endings clip, so the exact information a deaf viewer needs fades on screen.

No cognate footholds

  • A language unrelated to those around it
  • Finnish is a Uralic language, unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it, so its words share no roots a viewer could guess from. Where a lip-reader might fill a gap in a familiar-looking word, Finnish offers no such foothold — every missed sound is a word that cannot be reconstructed.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Finnish public TV subtitles most content — commercial channels, far less

Hearing loss is common in Finland and rises steeply with age — among older adults roughly 43% report difficulty following a conversation between several people, against a European backdrop in which about one in five people has some hearing loss. Public broadcasting leads: Yle produces dedicated subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing and has a legal obligation to subtitle a majority of its Finnish- and Swedish-language programming, which in practice it exceeds.

But the requirement on commercial channels is far lower — a fraction of Yle's obligation — so a deaf viewer who steps outside Yle quickly meets content with little or no deaf subtitling. Live programming can lag, streaming and social video vary, and the length contrasts, consonant gradation, and unrelated word roots that make Finnish so hard to lip-read leave a deaf viewer stranded wherever a caption is missing.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live Yle bulletin, a commercial-channel drama, a YouTube clip — and read Finnish captions in real time from the audio, whether or not that content was ever captioned.

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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Yle subtitles well but the commercial channels and streaming barely do. Captio AI captions the dialogue from the audio, in real time. It covers everything outside the public broadcaster."

Mikko V. 🇫🇮
mikko.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Helsinki — streaming viewer

"Finnish words are long and the length distinctions decide the word, none of which I can see. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio. I follow the whole show now."

Laura K. 🇫🇮
laura.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, Tampere — drama viewer

"Live news subtitles lag and consonant gradation changes the same word's consonants between forms. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Juhani M. 🇫🇮
juhani.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Helsinki — live news viewer

"Finnish YouTube auto-captions mangle the long words. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Sanna L. 🇫🇮
sanna.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, Turku — YouTube viewer

"Yle subtitles well but the commercial channels and streaming barely do. Captio AI captions the dialogue from the audio, in real time. It covers everything outside the public broadcaster."

Mikko V. 🇫🇮
mikko.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Helsinki — streaming viewer

"Finnish words are long and the length distinctions decide the word, none of which I can see. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio. I follow the whole show now."

Laura K. 🇫🇮
laura.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, Tampere — drama viewer

"Live news subtitles lag and consonant gradation changes the same word's consonants between forms. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Juhani M. 🇫🇮
juhani.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Helsinki — live news viewer

"Finnish YouTube auto-captions mangle the long words. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Sanna L. 🇫🇮
sanna.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, Turku — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Finnish.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store