Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Bosnian 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

A Bosnian family meal in Sarajevo, Mostar, or Tuzla where grandparents, parents, and children all speak differently and fast. Captio AI captions every voice across the table.

💼As a hearing colleague

A Bosnian household where conversations happen spontaneously throughout the day — morning exchanges, remarks between rooms, quick questions to hearing family members. Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard of hearing person in those moments.

❤️Partners and relationships

At home with a hearing partner whose family speaks the Bosnian of a different city or region. Captio AI captions their speech correctly so home life does not require extra effort from either side.

🏠Living together

Meeting a partner's Bosnian family for the first time, or being introduced to neighbours in the building. Captio AI captures the conversation in real time so the first meeting can be natural.

🤝Introducing someone new

A Bosnian courtyard gathering, iftar dinner, or neighbourhood celebration where multiple people speak at once. Captio AI captions the conversation so a deaf or hard of hearing person is part of it.

👥Mixed group settings

Spontaneous exchanges at the neighbourhood shop (dućan), pharmacy, or market. Captio AI captions what the person behind the counter is saying in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Bosnian
93.4%

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.

Bosnian

Why Bosnian is hard to understand

Four pitch accents

  • Short rising, short falling, long rising, long falling — all invisible to lip readers
  • Bosnian has four phonemic pitch accents — short rising, short falling, long rising, and long falling — that distinguish otherwise identical words. Pitch contour is entirely acoustic. A deaf or hard of hearing lip reader receives no signal for these distinctions in family conversation at a Sarajevo dinner table.

Ijekavian reflex

  • The Ijekavian pronunciation adds syllables that vary by region and by speaker generation
  • Bosnian uses the ijekavian pronunciation of the Old Slavic vowel ě — 'mlijeko' (milk), 'dijete' (child) — adding syllables compared to Ekavian varieties. These patterns affect syllable count and rhythm in a way that mismatches any lip-reading expectation built from other South Slavic language experience.

Hidden affricates

  • Four distinct affricates look nearly identical from outside the mouth
  • Bosnian has four phonemic affricates (/tɕ/, /tʂ/, /dʑ/, /dʐ/) — written as ć, č, đ, dž — that look nearly identical from outside the mouth. The distinction between them is meaningful in everyday vocabulary but entirely acoustic. A lip reader cannot distinguish which of the four a speaker is producing.

Velar fricative /x/

  • The sound 'h' is produced in the back of the throat with no lip trace
  • Bosnian 'h' (/x/) is produced as a velar or glottal fricative deep in the throat. It has no lip shape. A deaf person watching a speaker's mouth sees nothing in the position where this sound occurs — yet it distinguishes common word pairs in everyday Bosnian.

Sarajevo urban reduction

  • Fast urban Sarajevo Bosnian sounds significantly different from broadcast speech
  • Casual Sarajevo Bosnian contracts endings, drops unstressed syllables, and runs words together at speed. Heavy use of loanwords from Turkish, Arabic, and English adds phonological patterns absent from standard Bosnian. A deaf or hard of hearing person calibrated to broadcast Bosnian encounters a different sound stream in everyday family and neighbourhood conversation.

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The Challenge

Bosnia and Herzegovina has no national sign language recognition — and 1,044 registered deaf and hard of hearing people navigate daily life without a formal policy floor.

A retrospective study of registered persons with hearing loss in Bosnia and Herzegovina found 1,044 hard of hearing and deaf persons formally registered — 455 at employment offices and 589 receiving social care financial aid through centers for social work. These figures almost certainly undercount the true hearing loss burden, as informal registration is low in Bosnia and Herzegovina and disability data collection has been uneven across its two entities. The GBD 2019 study (PMC7960691) estimated globally that 1.5 billion people live with some degree of hearing loss, and for the western Balkans the regional prevalence aligns with European averages.

Bosnian Sign Language (BZJ) has no formal constitutional or legislative recognition at the state level in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Research and advocacy by organizations such as the Association of the Hearing Impaired of Bosnia-Herzegovina have documented significant barriers: decisions affecting deaf people are routinely made without deaf input, education in many settings is provided only in the spoken language without interpreter support, and deaf individuals — the majority of whom are born to hearing parents — often face isolation from their own families where no one has learned to sign.

The absence of a unified national sign language policy in BiH reflects the country's broader governance structure. Disability rights fall under entity-level jurisdiction, resulting in uneven provision of interpreter services across different regions. Deaf people in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Mostar navigate different systems with different resources, while the informal communication settings of everyday family life remain entirely outside any policy framework.

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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 Sarajevo Bosnian and mixes in Turkish loanwords. Captio AI reads it all correctly and I follow the full dinner conversation without anyone slowing down."

Amira H. 🇧🇦
amira.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Sarajevo Bosnian with Turkish loanwords, Sarajevo

"My partner's family speaks Mostar Bosnian — different vowel rhythm from Sarajevo. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family gatherings are easy now."

Emir K. 🇧🇦
emir.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from Mostar, Mostar

"Relatives visit from Tuzla and Zenica and each speaks a slightly different variety. Captio AI reads them all correctly and I am part of every family occasion."

Selma B. 🇧🇦
selma.b***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing relatives from Tuzla and Zenica, Sarajevo

"Conversations in the building happen fast and informally. Captio AI keeps me in those exchanges without anyone needing to write anything down."

Damir O. 🇧🇦
damir.o***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing neighbours in apartment building, Banja Luka

"My family speaks fast Sarajevo Bosnian and mixes in Turkish loanwords. Captio AI reads it all correctly and I follow the full dinner conversation without anyone slowing down."

Amira H. 🇧🇦
amira.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Sarajevo Bosnian with Turkish loanwords, Sarajevo

"My partner's family speaks Mostar Bosnian — different vowel rhythm from Sarajevo. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family gatherings are easy now."

Emir K. 🇧🇦
emir.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from Mostar, Mostar

"Relatives visit from Tuzla and Zenica and each speaks a slightly different variety. Captio AI reads them all correctly and I am part of every family occasion."

Selma B. 🇧🇦
selma.b***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing relatives from Tuzla and Zenica, Sarajevo

"Conversations in the building happen fast and informally. Captio AI keeps me in those exchanges without anyone needing to write anything down."

Damir O. 🇧🇦
damir.o***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing neighbours in apartment building, Banja Luka

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Bosnian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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