Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Thai 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

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

🎬Streaming content

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

📱YouTube and social media

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

🌍Foreign-language content

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

🎭Cinema

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

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Thai 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

Thai
90.5%

character 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.

Thai

Why Thai is hard to understand

Five tones

  • Meaning carried by pitch, not by the mouth
  • Thai has five tones — mid, low, falling, high, and rising — and the same syllable in different tones is a different word. Tone lives in pitch, with no lip cue, so a deaf viewer watching a lakorn drama or a news anchor gets none of the tonal information that fixes the meaning.

Close tone pairs

  • Tones that even the ear confuses without context
  • Some Thai tones sit perceptually close and are hard to tell apart when context is missing. For a deaf viewer relying on the screen, these near-identical tones are completely invisible, so a whole set of words collapses into one shape in a fast scene.

Vowel length

  • Short and long vowels that change the word
  • Thai contrasts short and long vowels — a long vowel lasts about twice as long as a short one, and the difference is phonemic. This is a timing distinction, not a lip shape, so on screen a deaf viewer cannot see which of two terms was said.

Unaspirated and final stops

  • Consonants with little or no visible release
  • Thai has a voiceless unaspirated stop series and unreleased final stops that give a lip-reader almost no visible cue. These distinguish words, so a deaf viewer watching a face cannot see the consonants that separate one term from another.

Thai–English code-switching

  • English dropped into Thai content
  • Thai dramas, variety shows, and vlogs drop English terms into Thai sentences, often reshaped to Thai sound patterns. A deaf viewer meets a term that is neither fully Thai nor clearly English, with no lip to read after a fast cut.

Download for free

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The Challenge

Thailand mandated captioning — but real-time Thai captions came late

Hearing loss is widespread in Thailand and rises steeply with age: a national cohort found roughly 8.5% of adults reporting trouble hearing, and a Bangkok survey found moderate or greater impairment in a meaningful share of residents. Thailand's broadcasting regulator, the NBTC, issued a regulation in 2016 requiring closed captioning of television programmes.

But the rules ran ahead of the technology: at the time the regulation was issued there was no real-time Thai captioning service, and the first live-broadcast captioning in Thai came only in 2019, for a single national ceremony. Live news and events remain the hardest content to caption, streaming subtitle quality varies, and social and short-video content is largely uncaptioned — while the five-tone system that makes Thai so hard to lip-read leaves 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 Thai PBS bulletin, a TrueID lakorn, a YouTube clip — and read Thai 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

"Live Thai news is the hardest to caption and the five tones give me nothing on the lips. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Somchai P. 🇹🇭
somchai.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bangkok — live news viewer

"Lakorn dramas drop English into Thai and the captions are inconsistent. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio, in real time. I follow the whole drama now."

Nattaya S. 🇹🇭
nattaya.s***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bangkok — lakorn viewer

"The tones sound almost the same to me and streaming captions are patchy. Captio AI captions the dialogue from the audio accurately. I stopped guessing at the plot."

Anan K. 🇹🇭
anan.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Chiang Mai — streaming viewer

"Thai YouTube auto-captions are unreliable and most clips have none. Captio AI captions any video accurately in real time. It covers exactly the content the platforms never do."

Pim T. 🇹🇭
pim.t***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bangkok — YouTube viewer

"Live Thai news is the hardest to caption and the five tones give me nothing on the lips. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. The words finally line up with the picture."

Somchai P. 🇹🇭
somchai.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bangkok — live news viewer

"Lakorn dramas drop English into Thai and the captions are inconsistent. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio, in real time. I follow the whole drama now."

Nattaya S. 🇹🇭
nattaya.s***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bangkok — lakorn viewer

"The tones sound almost the same to me and streaming captions are patchy. Captio AI captions the dialogue from the audio accurately. I stopped guessing at the plot."

Anan K. 🇹🇭
anan.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Chiang Mai — streaming viewer

"Thai YouTube auto-captions are unreliable and most clips have none. Captio AI captions any video accurately in real time. It covers exactly the content the platforms never do."

Pim T. 🇹🇭
pim.t***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bangkok — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Thai.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store