Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Croatian 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 Croatian family table where grandparents speak their local Kajkavian or Čakavian, parents use standard Štokavian Croatian, and young family members mix in English. Captio AI keeps up across all dialect layers.

💼As a hearing colleague

Croatian workplaces blend formal standard and colloquial Zagreb speech. Captio AI lets a deaf colleague follow team meetings, corridor discussions, and the casual banter that shapes working relationships.

❤️Partners and relationships

A hearing partner who grew up speaking Dalmatian Čakavian or Zagreb Kajkavian can speak naturally at home. Captio AI captions every word in real time so home conversation does not require extra effort from either side.

🏠Living together

Morning small talk, household logistics, and spontaneous remarks from the next room — Captio AI keeps a deaf or hard of hearing person connected to everyday home life in a Croatian-speaking household.

🤝Introducing someone new

Meeting a hearing Croatian family member, partner's relatives, or new neighbour. Captio AI captures their speech in real time so the introduction can be natural.

👥Mixed group settings

At a Croatian family celebration, coastal gathering, or neighbourhood dinner where multiple people talk across each other, Captio AI captions the conversation so a deaf or hard of hearing person is part of the room.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Croatian
90.5%

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.

Croatian

Why Croatian is hard to understand

Pitch accent

  • Four tonal accents with no visual trace
  • Croatian has four phonemic pitch accents (short falling, short rising, long falling, long rising) that distinguish word pairs — 'lûk' (bow/instrument) vs 'lùk' (onion/garlic), 'pȁs' (dog) vs 'pȃs' (belt). The lip positions are identical. A deaf or hard of hearing lip reader receives no signal for distinctions that are entirely acoustic.

Three-dialect system

  • Kajkavian and Čakavian sound very different from standard Štokavian
  • Croatian has three major dialect groups: Štokavian (the basis of standard Croatian), Čakavian (spoken along the Dalmatian coast and islands), and Kajkavian (spoken in northwestern Croatia and Zagreb's hinterland). A deaf or hard of hearing person who has learned to lip-read standard Štokavian encounters completely different phonological patterns in family members who speak Kajkavian or Čakavian.

Consonant clusters

  • Words built only from consonants — no lip-readable vowel
  • Croatian permits dense consonant clusters: 'prst' (finger), 'krst' (cross), 'strka'. These words play out in sequences of consonant positions with no vowel to anchor lip-reading. A deaf or hard of hearing person who depends on vowel movement as the backbone of lip-reading finds entire words without one.

Final devoicing

  • Voiced consonants devoice at word ends — a purely auditory signal
  • At word boundaries, Croatian voiced obstruents devoice: 'rob' (slave) sounds like 'rop' in isolation, 'grad' (city) sounds like 'grat'. The voiced–voiceless distinction that separates meaning is lost on the lips, as the stop position looks identical for voiced and voiceless pairs.

Colloquial Zagreb reduction

  • Everyday Zagreb speech contracts syllables that standard Croatian keeps
  • Casual Zagreb speech drops syllables, contracts common words, and compresses phrases in ways that standard Croatian does not. A deaf or hard of hearing person calibrated to broadcast standard Croatian encounters an unfamiliar sound stream in everyday Zagreb street conversation.

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The Challenge

Croatia has 13,000 people with hearing impairment and 6,500 deaf sign language users — served by only 60 interpreters.

According to the 2011 Croatian census and data from the Croatian Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, approximately 13,230 people in Croatia have impaired hearing, of whom 2,763 have total or major disability. Among these, around 6,500 are Deaf sign language users — and they are served by approximately 60 qualified sign language interpreters nationwide. This interpreter-to-user ratio means that formal communication access cannot be guaranteed for everyday situations: a deaf person needing an interpreter for a family legal matter, a medical appointment, or a community event must schedule weeks in advance or go without.

Croatian Sign Language legislation has remained in a state of incomplete ratification. The Croatian Sign Language Act was drafted but had not completed the formal adoption procedure as of the most recent available data, meaning Croatian deaf and hard of hearing individuals lack the statutory rights to interpreter access that equivalent legislation in neighbouring countries provides. The European Union of the Deaf has noted Croatia as a country where policy intent and implementation diverge significantly.

Research into deaf education in Croatia (PMC3583401) documents that communication through writing and reading is frequently impaired for deaf students due to limited vocabulary and agrammatism — outcomes of insufficient early language access. These educational gaps compound into employment and social participation barriers in adulthood. Global burden data (PMC7960691) places hearing loss among the leading causes of years lived with disability, with the burden in Southeastern Europe reflecting the region's uneven service provision.

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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 Kajkavian at home — a completely different sound from the standard Croatian I learned. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and I follow the full family conversation now."

Ivana M. 🇭🇷
ivana.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Kajkavian, Zagreb

"My family speaks coastal Čakavian and the patterns were always different from broadcast Croatian. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family dinners are easy."

Ante B. 🇭🇷
ante.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Čakavian-speaking family from Dalmatian coast, Split

"My partner grew up on an island and speaks coastal Čakavian. Captio AI reads his speech correctly — right words, right meaning — and our evenings at home are easy."

Maja K. 🇭🇷
maja.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing partner speaks Čakavian, Rijeka

"Office conversations happen fast in standard Croatian but at full conversational speed. Captio AI keeps me in those conversations without anyone needing to repeat."

Tomislav S. 🇭🇷
tomislav.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, standard Croatian colleagues, Osijek

"My family speaks Kajkavian at home — a completely different sound from the standard Croatian I learned. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and I follow the full family conversation now."

Ivana M. 🇭🇷
ivana.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks Kajkavian, Zagreb

"My family speaks coastal Čakavian and the patterns were always different from broadcast Croatian. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family dinners are easy."

Ante B. 🇭🇷
ante.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Čakavian-speaking family from Dalmatian coast, Split

"My partner grew up on an island and speaks coastal Čakavian. Captio AI reads his speech correctly — right words, right meaning — and our evenings at home are easy."

Maja K. 🇭🇷
maja.k***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing partner speaks Čakavian, Rijeka

"Office conversations happen fast in standard Croatian but at full conversational speed. Captio AI keeps me in those conversations without anyone needing to repeat."

Tomislav S. 🇭🇷
tomislav.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, standard Croatian colleagues, Osijek

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Croatian.

Captio AI is free to start

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