Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Italian 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

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

🎬Streaming content

RaiPlay, Netflix, and other platforms vary in subtitle quality — RaiPlay often lacks captions even for programmes subtitled on TV. Captio AI works as a consistent fallback for any Italian show or film.

📱YouTube and social media

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

🌍Foreign-language content

A foreign film, a foreign documentary, a non-Italian channel — much of it dubbed into Italian. 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 Italian captions of the dialogue discreetly from your seat.

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Italian 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

Italian
95.5%

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.

Italian

Why Italian is hard to understand

Consonant gemination

  • Doubled consonants that change the word
  • Italian contrasts single and doubled consonants — 'nono' and 'nonno', 'copia' and 'coppia' — and the difference is how long the consonant is held. This is a timing distinction, not a lip shape, so on screen a deaf viewer cannot see which of two words was said.

Fast connected speech

  • Vowels and words that run together at pace
  • Italian words end in vowels and chain into one another, and a news anchor or a drama character delivers at speed. The vowel-to-vowel linking blurs word boundaries, so a deaf viewer watching a face sees a continuous flow with no clear seams.

Syntactic doubling

  • Words that double the next consonant across a boundary
  • In central and southern Italian, certain words trigger gemination of the first consonant of the following word. The change happens across a word boundary, invisibly, so the same word can look different depending on what precedes it — another timing effect a lip-reader cannot catch on screen.

Regional varieties on screen

  • Milan, Rome, and Naples colour the dialogue
  • Italian film and TV feature Italian coloured by northern, Roman, or southern speech — different vowel qualities, intonation, and degrees of gemination. A deaf viewer calibrated to standard northern Italian meets shifting speech from one show or character to the next.

Dubbing and mismatched lips

  • Foreign content dubbed into Italian never matches the mouth
  • Italy dubs most foreign film and TV into Italian, 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

Italy subtitles some of RAI — but not RaiPlay, and dubs the rest

Out of nearly 59 million people in Italy, an estimated 3.5 million live with some form of hearing loss. The public broadcaster RAI provides subtitles for deaf viewers on part of its programming, with a colour-coding system that marks who is speaking — but RAI does not subtitle everything, so deaf viewers are left choosing from whatever the schedule happens to caption.

The gaps widen off broadcast. The RaiPlay streaming platform, in most cases, does not carry captions even for programmes that were subtitled when they aired on television, and other streaming, social, and short-video content varies. Above all, Italy dubs most foreign film and television into Italian — so a deaf viewer relying on lip-reading gets a mouth that never matches the soundtrack, with no accessible caption to fall back on.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live RAI bulletin, a RaiPlay programme with no captions, a dubbed foreign film — and read Italian captions in real time from the audio, whether or not that content was ever subtitled.

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

"Foreign films are dubbed into Italian, so the lips never match the sound. Captio AI captions the Italian soundtrack from the audio. For the first time I can watch a dubbed film and actually follow it."

Marco B. 🇮🇹
marco.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Milan — foreign-film viewer

"RaiPlay often has no captions even for shows that were subtitled on TV. Captio AI captions whatever is playing from the audio, in real time. It fills exactly the gap the platform leaves."

Giulia R. 🇮🇹
giulia.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Rome — streaming viewer

"Italian runs the vowels together so fast I cannot lip-read a line, and live subtitles lag. Captio AI is right there with the anchor, word for word. I read the news as it happens."

Alessandro F. 🇮🇹
alessandro.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Turin — live TV viewer

"Southern Italian doubles consonants across words and the doubling is invisible to me. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Francesca M. 🇮🇹
francesca.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Naples — YouTube viewer

"Foreign films are dubbed into Italian, so the lips never match the sound. Captio AI captions the Italian soundtrack from the audio. For the first time I can watch a dubbed film and actually follow it."

Marco B. 🇮🇹
marco.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Milan — foreign-film viewer

"RaiPlay often has no captions even for shows that were subtitled on TV. Captio AI captions whatever is playing from the audio, in real time. It fills exactly the gap the platform leaves."

Giulia R. 🇮🇹
giulia.r***@gmail.com
Deaf, Rome — streaming viewer

"Italian runs the vowels together so fast I cannot lip-read a line, and live subtitles lag. Captio AI is right there with the anchor, word for word. I read the news as it happens."

Alessandro F. 🇮🇹
alessandro.f***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Turin — live TV viewer

"Southern Italian doubles consonants across words and the doubling is invisible to me. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Francesca M. 🇮🇹
francesca.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Naples — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Italian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store