Nagish

Nagish Inc., doing business as Rylo, develops AI-powered communication tools for people who are Deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech disabilities. Its flagship product is a mobile app for iPhone and Android that captions incoming and outgoing phone calls in real time and converts typed text to speech, allowing users to take part in phone, video, conference and speakerphone conversations by reading and typing or speaking. The company describes its offering as the first end-to-end private relay service, letting users communicate without a human third party such as an interpreter, stenographer or relay operator.

App features include keeping an existing phone number or obtaining a new one for calls and texts, locally stored call transcripts, adjustable caption styles and text display, keyboard shortcuts to control tone and pace of talk-to-text audio, AI-generated quick replies, speaker and sentiment indicators, spam and profanity filtering, support for more than 50 languages with automatic language-change detection, and pairing with hearing aids, cochlear implants and Bluetooth headsets. The service is offered at no cost to individuals with hearing loss; under its terms of use, registered users represent that they have a hearing or speech disability necessitating a captioned or relayed telephone service, and the cost of captioning is funded through a government program with reimbursement sought through the Interstate Telecommunications Relay Service framework. The company also publishes educational content on Deaf culture and hearing loss and operates a help center and 24/7 support channels.

Founding story

The company began as a side project of Tomer Aharoni and co-founder Alon Ezer, both graduates of the computer science faculty at Columbia University. Aharoni, an NLP specialist, started developing an automatic translation and transcription engine for Deaf users in 2019. The project accelerated in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns left many Deaf people unable to communicate and app downloads climbed rapidly. An early funding request from Comcast to build a solution enabling Deaf users to communicate through software such as Zoom helped launch the business. The name Nagish means "accessible" in Hebrew.

Business model

Nagish provides its call captioning app free to individuals with hearing loss, with captioning costs funded through a government program; the company seeks reimbursement for captioned calls through the Interstate Telecommunications Relay Service mechanism, and following FCC certification as an authorized relay provider it is paid per minute of calls placed through its application. It also works with large enterprises whose employees use the product for personal and business communication.

Per-minute reimbursement for captioned relay calls under the U.S. federal telecommunications relay services program, following FCC certification, alongside enterprise partnerships.

Traction

Tens of thousands of individuals worldwide had used the service as of July 2024, and enterprise partnerships included Comcast, Pfizer, NBCUniversal and Amazon, where Deaf employees in logistics centers use it for workplace communication. The company's software is integrated into Comcast's communication solutions. The app carries a 4.6 rating from 3,681 reviews on the company's website.

Latest developments

The service is now marketed as Rylo, described on the website as a free, FCC-certified call captioning and live transcription app; terms of service under the name Nagish Inc. d/b/a Rylo were last updated May 24, 2026, and the site publishes Deaf culture and hearing loss articles dated June 2026. Recent company announcements include sponsorship of the U.S. men's and women's basketball teams at the 2025 Deaflympics and release of a survey report, The Impact of Communication Technology, on communication barriers for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people in social, medical and professional settings.