Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Tagalog 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

GMA and news channels run live bulletins that pre-generated captions can lag behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read the Tagalog as it is spoken, not several seconds behind the anchor.

🎬Streaming content

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

📱YouTube and social media

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

🌍Foreign-language content

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

🎭Cinema

Not every cinema showing is captioned. Hold Captio AI near the audio and read real-time Tagalog captions of the dialogue discreetly from your seat.

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Filipino 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

Tagalog
89.2%

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.

Tagalog

Why Tagalog is hard to understand

Glottal stops

  • Sounds made in the throat that break words apart
  • Tagalog inserts a glottal stop between adjacent vowels and at the start of vowel-initial words — a catch in the throat with no lip movement at all. On a TV drama or a fast news read, a deaf viewer cannot see these stops, so word boundaries and meaning-changing distinctions disappear on screen.

Taglish code-switching

  • Tagalog and English woven together sentence by sentence
  • Filipino TV, film, and YouTube run on Taglish — a fluent blend of Tagalog and English that switches within a single sentence, often on the key words. A deaf viewer must jump between two phonologies with no visual warning, and no lip to read after a fast cut.

Stress and length

  • Where the stress falls changes the word
  • In Tagalog, two words can differ only in stress placement or in a final glottal stop, not in their consonants and vowels. These are pitch and timing cues, not lip shapes, so on screen a deaf viewer cannot tell such pairs apart in a scene.

Casual reduction

  • Fast speech blurs the distinctions that carry meaning
  • The main challenge in spoken Tagalog is hearing the reduced distinctions of casual speech. In a lively teleserye or a comedy scene those distinctions blur and words run together, leaving a deaf viewer with a fast, connected stream and little visual footing.

Regional accents on screen

  • Cebuano, Kapampangan, and Ilocano colour the dialogue
  • Filipino content features Tagalog coloured by Cebuano, Kapampangan, or Ilocano speech. A deaf viewer calibrated to Manila Tagalog meets shifting speech from one show or character to the next, and the face on a small screen is hard to lip-read anyway.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

The Philippines passed a closed-caption law — but reality falls short

A national survey found moderate or worse hearing loss in around 15% of the Philippine population — nearly one in six people — and government figures put the number of Filipinos who are deaf or hearing-impaired at roughly 1.44 million. In 2016 the Philippines passed the Closed Caption Law (Republic Act 10905), requiring all television stations and programme producers to broadcast with a closed-caption option, including newscasts and pre-scripted programmes.

But the law has been slow and uneven in practice. It carries exemptions — short public service announcements, programmes aired between 1 and 6 a.m., and cases where compliance would be economically burdensome — and years after passage, deaf advocates have had to press networks to comply. Streaming subtitle quality varies, YouTube auto-captions for Tagalog are unreliable, social video is largely uncaptioned, and the constant Taglish mixing of Filipino content is exactly where automated subtitles struggle most.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live GMA bulletin, a teleserye, a YouTube clip — and read Tagalog and Taglish captions in real time, whether or not that content carries the caption option the law requires.

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

"There is a caption law but half the shows still do not carry them, and teleseryes are pure Taglish anyway. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio, in real time. I follow the whole story now."

Miguel S. 🇵🇭
miguel.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Manila — teleserye viewer

"Live news captions lag when they exist at all, and the glottal stops break words in ways I cannot see. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Andrea D. 🇵🇭
andrea.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, Cebu — live news viewer

"Filipino YouTube auto-captions are a mess and speakers bring their province's accent. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Jose R. 🇵🇭
jose.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Davao — YouTube viewer

"Filipino films rarely have captioned showings. I hold Captio AI on my knee and read the dialogue from my seat. I stopped waiting for a subtitled home release to watch a film."

Maria L. 🇵🇭
maria.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, Quezon City — cinema-goer

"There is a caption law but half the shows still do not carry them, and teleseryes are pure Taglish anyway. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio, in real time. I follow the whole story now."

Miguel S. 🇵🇭
miguel.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Manila — teleserye viewer

"Live news captions lag when they exist at all, and the glottal stops break words in ways I cannot see. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Andrea D. 🇵🇭
andrea.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, Cebu — live news viewer

"Filipino YouTube auto-captions are a mess and speakers bring their province's accent. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Jose R. 🇵🇭
jose.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Davao — YouTube viewer

"Filipino films rarely have captioned showings. I hold Captio AI on my knee and read the dialogue from my seat. I stopped waiting for a subtitled home release to watch a film."

Maria L. 🇵🇭
maria.l***@gmail.com
Deaf, Quezon City — cinema-goer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Tagalog.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store