Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

French 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

TF1 and France Télévisions run live news and sport that pre-generated subtitles lag behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read the French as it is spoken, not several seconds behind the presenter.

🎬Streaming content

Netflix, myCANAL, and other platforms vary in subtitle quality and availability. Captio AI works as a consistent fallback for any French show or film that ships with wrong, delayed, or missing captions.

📱YouTube and social media

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

🌍Foreign-language content

A foreign film, a foreign documentary, a non-French channel — much of it dubbed into French. Live Translator captions and translates in real time so anything becomes watchable as it plays.

🎭Cinema

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

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most French 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

French
94.3%

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.

French

Why French is hard to understand

Nasal vowels

  • Vowels made in the nose, not on the lips
  • French relies on nasal vowels — the sounds in 'information', 'enfant', 'bon'. Nasalization is produced at the soft palate with little visible lip movement, so on a film or a news read a deaf viewer misses a contrast that changes the word.

Liaison and enchaînement

  • Words that run together across boundaries
  • In French, normally silent final consonants resurface and link onto the next word, and words chain together so boundaries blur. A deaf viewer cannot see where one word ends and the next begins, and at broadcast pace a whole line becomes one continuous, unreadable stream.

Silent letters

  • Speech and spelling that behave like two languages
  • Most word-final consonants in French are silent, so what is written and what is spoken diverge sharply. A deaf viewer cannot fall back on an expected ending to anchor a word, because the ending is not pronounced at all — until liaison suddenly brings it back.

Regional and national varieties

  • Paris, Brussels, Geneva, and Quebec differ on screen
  • French-language film and TV span metropolitan, Belgian, Swiss, and Québécois speech, differing in vowels and rhythm. A deaf viewer calibrated to Paris French finds a Montréal or Brussels production carries different vowel shapes.

Dubbing and mismatched lips

  • Foreign content dubbed into French never matches the mouth
  • France dubs most foreign film and TV into French, so the words a viewer hears do not match the lips on screen at all. For a deaf viewer relying on lip-reading, dubbed content is impossible — the mouth is speaking a different language from the soundtrack.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

France requires subtitles — and still dubs almost everything foreign

In France, research finds that around 25% of adults have some form of hearing loss, with over six million people facing hearing difficulty in daily life, and around 180,000 defining themselves as deaf. France has one of Europe's stronger subtitling frameworks: a 2005 law requires all public channels and private channels above a 2.5% audience share to make their entire programming accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers, and the regulator's charter sets detailed quality rules, including colour-coding subtitles by speaker.

But regulation covers broadcast, and reality outruns it. Live programming lags, streaming and social video vary, and above all France dubs most foreign film and television into French — so a deaf viewer relying on lip-reading gets a mouth that never matches the soundtrack, with no accessible caption on much of it. Meeting a subtitling percentage on broadcast is not the same as every screen a viewer opens being accessible.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live France 2 bulletin, a dubbed foreign series, a YouTube clip — and read French 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

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Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Everything foreign is dubbed into French, so the lips never match the sound. Captio AI captions the French soundtrack from the audio. For the first time I can watch a dubbed film and actually follow it."

Camille D. 🇫🇷
camille.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Paris — foreign-film viewer

"Live news subtitles lag and Belgian French is not the metropolitan standard I read best. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Lucas M. 🇧🇪
lucas.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Brussels — live TV viewer

"French liaison runs every word together so I cannot lip-read a line at all, and streaming captions are patchy. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio. I follow the whole film now."

Chloé R. 🇫🇷
chloe.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lyon — streaming viewer

"French YouTube barely has captions and the nasal vowels give me nothing on the lips. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Antoine G. 🇨🇭
antoine.g***@gmail.com
Deaf, Geneva — YouTube viewer

"Everything foreign is dubbed into French, so the lips never match the sound. Captio AI captions the French soundtrack from the audio. For the first time I can watch a dubbed film and actually follow it."

Camille D. 🇫🇷
camille.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Paris — foreign-film viewer

"Live news subtitles lag and Belgian French is not the metropolitan standard I read best. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Lucas M. 🇧🇪
lucas.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Brussels — live TV viewer

"French liaison runs every word together so I cannot lip-read a line at all, and streaming captions are patchy. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio. I follow the whole film now."

Chloé R. 🇫🇷
chloe.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Lyon — streaming viewer

"French YouTube barely has captions and the nasal vowels give me nothing on the lips. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Antoine G. 🇨🇭
antoine.g***@gmail.com
Deaf, Geneva — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in French.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store