Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Albanian live captions and productivity tool for communicating with deaf & hoh

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

👨‍👩‍👧Family conversations

An Albanian family table where older relatives speak Gheg, parents speak standard Albanian, and younger family members mix in English or Italian words. Captio AI keeps up across all varieties.

💼As a hearing colleague

Albanian workplaces blend standard written Albanian with regional spoken varieties. Captio AI lets a deaf colleague follow team meetings, corridor conversations, and the informal banter that shapes office life.

❤️Partners and relationships

A hearing partner who grew up speaking Gheg from northern Albania or Kosovo can speak naturally at home. Captio AI captions their speech in real time, so conversation does not require constant written notes.

🏠Living together

Morning small talk, household logistics, and spontaneous remarks from another room — Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard of hearing person connected to everyday Albanian home life.

🤝Introducing someone new

Meeting a hearing Albanian family member, neighbour, or new acquaintance. Captio AI captures their speech so the introduction can be natural rather than slowed or repeated.

👥Mixed group settings

At an Albanian family gathering, wedding, or neighbourhood celebration where multiple voices overlap and conversation moves fast, Captio AI captions the room so a deaf or hard of hearing person stays part of it.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Albanian
92.3%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

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Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

You talk. They follow. No adjustment needed.

You speak naturally

No slowing down, no special phrasing, no training required. Captio AI handles everything — you just talk the way you always do.

They read as you speak

Your words appear on their screen word by word while you are still talking. Not a summary after — the full sentence, in real time.

Works wherever you both are

Living rooms, offices, restaurants, social gatherings. No venue setup, no special conditions. Captio AI works anywhere you have a conversation.

No sign language from either side

You do not need to learn anything new. Neither do they. Captio AI bridges the gap without requiring any change to how either of you communicates.

Works with how you actually speak

Fast, accented, casual. Captio AI handles real speech — not just slow, clear dictation. You do not need to perform clarity for it to work.

Private by default

Your conversations are never recorded, stored, or shared. Audio is processed in real time and discarded immediately — nothing is kept.

Albanian

Why Albanian is hard to understand

Rhotacism

  • Tosk turns /n/ to /r/ — an auditory distinction only
  • Standard Albanian (based on Tosk) turns historical /n/ between vowels to /r/ — so Gheg forms become Tosk forms with a different consonant at the same position. A lip reader sees the same dental or alveolar position from either speaker. The rhotacism that distinguishes the two varieties is entirely acoustic.

Gheg nasal vowels

  • Nasality is invisible on the lips
  • Gheg Albanian has phonemic nasal vowels absent from Tosk. Nasal resonance is produced in the nasal cavity with no change in lip shape — the lips look identical for an oral vowel and its nasal counterpart. A deaf or hard of hearing person lip-reading a Gheg speaker receives no visual signal for this distinction.

Vowel length contrast

  • Long and short vowels look identical
  • Gheg preserves length distinctions in vowels where Tosk does not. Like pitch accent in other languages, vowel duration is entirely auditory — two vowels with different lengths position the lips identically. Lip reading provides no cue for the length contrast that is phonemically meaningful in Gheg.

Uvular borrowings

  • Ottoman loanwords contain throat consonants invisible on the lips
  • Albanian absorbed numerous Ottoman Turkish borrowings that contain uvular consonants and guttural patterns produced at the back of the mouth and the pharynx. These sounds have no visible lip signature. A deaf or hard of hearing person lip-reading Albanian encounters words where the most distinctive consonants are completely hidden.

Gheg reduction

  • Fast Gheg drops vowels and compresses word boundaries
  • Casual northern Albanian and Kosovo Gheg speech drops unstressed initial vowels and contracts consonant clusters, producing a sound stream that does not match the standard written form. A lip reader using written Albanian as a scaffold finds the gap between text and speech particularly wide in Gheg contexts.

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The Challenge

Albania's deaf community navigated daily life for decades without a nationally funded sign language infrastructure.

Albania's deaf community operated for many years without official documentation or government recognition. A 2015 survey commissioned by the Ministry of Social Welfare and Youth — the first systematic study of its kind — found that deaf adults in Albania faced significant barriers to education, employment, and everyday communication. The survey, carried out by the Albanian National Association of the Deaf (ANAD) in partnership with the Finnish Association of the Deaf, documented how deaf Albanians communicated with hearing family members: many relied on gesture and informal improvised systems rather than recognised Albanian Sign Language.

The findings pointed to structural gaps: limited access to Albanian Sign Language interpreter services, low rates of tertiary education completion among deaf adults, and employment barriers that left many deaf Albanians economically dependent on families. Communication in government offices, healthcare settings, and legal proceedings was identified as particularly difficult, with no systematic interpreter provision in place.

WHO global data (GBD 2019, PMC7960691) estimates that approximately 1.5 billion people live with some degree of hearing loss worldwide, with the highest burden in developing and transitional economies. Albania, as a developing European economy, is still expanding its hearing health infrastructure — newborn screening, early intervention, and interpreter training remain areas of active development rather than established practice.

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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

"My family speaks fast Tirana Albanian and I was catching maybe half. Captio AI reads their speech in real time and I follow the full conversation now."

Erjona M. 🇦🇱
erjona.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Tosk Albanian at home, Tirana

"My partner and his family speak Gheg — nasal vowels, dropped syllables, a different rhythm from standard Albanian. Captio AI reads his speech correctly and home conversation is easy."

Besnik K. 🇽🇰
besnik.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Gheg-speaking partner and family from Kosovo, Pristina

"People in my office mix Gheg and Tosk patterns depending on where they grew up. Captio AI keeps up with all of it and I follow work conversations without asking people to repeat."

Mirela D. 🇦🇱
mirela.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, colleagues in Tirana office speak mixed Gheg and Tosk, Tirana

"Family weddings bring Gheg relatives from the north and Tosk relatives from the south and everyone talks at once. Captio AI captions the room and I am part of the celebration."

Artan H. 🇦🇱
artan.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, family gatherings with Gheg and Tosk relatives, Durrës

"My family speaks fast Tirana Albanian and I was catching maybe half. Captio AI reads their speech in real time and I follow the full conversation now."

Erjona M. 🇦🇱
erjona.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Tosk Albanian at home, Tirana

"My partner and his family speak Gheg — nasal vowels, dropped syllables, a different rhythm from standard Albanian. Captio AI reads his speech correctly and home conversation is easy."

Besnik K. 🇽🇰
besnik.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Gheg-speaking partner and family from Kosovo, Pristina

"People in my office mix Gheg and Tosk patterns depending on where they grew up. Captio AI keeps up with all of it and I follow work conversations without asking people to repeat."

Mirela D. 🇦🇱
mirela.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, colleagues in Tirana office speak mixed Gheg and Tosk, Tirana

"Family weddings bring Gheg relatives from the north and Tosk relatives from the south and everyone talks at once. Captio AI captions the room and I am part of the celebration."

Artan H. 🇦🇱
artan.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, family gatherings with Gheg and Tosk relatives, Durrës

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Albanian.

Captio AI is free to start

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