Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hungarian 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

👨‍👩‍👧Family conversations

Hungarian families talk at the kitchen table in the warm, close cadence of everyday home life. Captio AI captions your hearing family's Hungarian in real time so you follow the full conversation — not just the parts where someone happened to face you.

💼As a hearing colleague

In a Budapest office or a provincial workplace, colleagues exchange quick questions and hallway comments in fast everyday Hungarian. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so your deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows informal exchanges without missing a word.

❤️Partners and relationships

When your partner speaks Hungarian naturally and you are deaf or hard of hearing, Captio AI closes the gap. They talk at their normal pace; you read every word. Daily conversation at home becomes something you have fully.

🏠Living together

Morning exchanges over coffee, questions from another room, comments about the news. Captio AI covers the small daily Hungarian moments that add up to connection — in Budapest, Debrecen, Pécs, or a village in the countryside.

🤝Introducing someone new

When you meet a hearing Hungarian speaker for the first time, Captio AI starts immediately. They speak; you read. No awkward explanation, no searching for a way to communicate.

👥Mixed group settings

At a family celebration, a name day party, or a neighbourhood gathering, people talk over each other and the room fills with noise. Captio AI captions whoever you point your phone at so you are fully part of the occasion.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hungarian
94.4%

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.

Hungarian

Why Hungarian is hard to understand

Fourteen-vowel system

  • Hungarian's 14 vowels include front rounded pairs where the lip difference between related forms is invisible
  • Hungarian distinguishes 14 vowels, including front rounded vowels — ö, ő, ü, ű — that differ from their unrounded counterparts primarily in tongue position, not lip shape. The short/long pairs (ö/ő, ü/ű) add a duration contrast on top. For a deaf or HoH person lip-reading at a family dinner, the distinction between grammatically distinct utterances may rest entirely on a vowel quality that leaves no visible trace on the face.

Geminates throughout the lexicon

  • Hungarian doubles nearly any consonant — a meaning-changing contrast that is fully auditory and invisible at the lips
  • Hungarian uses geminate (doubled) consonants to distinguish words: halat (fish, accusative) vs. hallat (makes heard), megy (goes) vs. meggy (sour cherry). The written form doubles the letter, but the spoken difference — a slightly longer consonant closure — is auditory, not visible. At the pace of a normal family conversation, the duration difference between a single and a geminate consonant is one of the hardest things for a deaf or HoH person to recover from lip-reading alone.

Agglutinative word length

  • Hungarian stacks suffixes to create very long words that stretch the lip-reading scan beyond what a single pass can capture
  • Hungarian agglutination produces words like megszentségteleníthetetlen that carry grammatical information distributed across many syllables. Long agglutinated words spread the phonological information over more syllables than in almost any other European language, making it harder to catch from a single visual scan. A deaf or HoH person following a hearing family member's fast speech must track more syllables per word than they would in French, German, or Greek.

Neutral vowel suffix unpredictability

  • Hungarian 'neutral' vowels like e and i can take either front or back suffixes, breaking the pattern a deaf person relies on to anticipate word endings
  • Hungarian has 'neutral' vowels that are front in quality but can harmonize with back-vowel stems, producing unpredictable suffix variation. Some verbs with /e/ in the root take back-vowel suffixes, others take front-vowel suffixes. For a deaf or HoH person who has learned to anticipate suffix shapes to confirm a word, the neutral-vowel exception breaks that expectation frequently in everyday conversation.

Budapest vs. regional dialect vowel shift

  • Hungarian dialects across the country shift vowel quality and quantity in ways that change the expected lip shapes for familiar words
  • Hungarian dialects show significant vowel variation: eastern varieties preserve older long vowels that Budapest Hungarian has shortened, and southern Transdanubian dialects show different roundness patterns. A deaf or HoH person calibrated to Budapest speech may find that a family member from Debrecen or Pécs produces words that, on the lips, do not match the expected mouth shapes.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Hungary: constitutional recognition, neonatal screening, and the gap in daily life

Hungary is one of only four countries in the world to have recognised its national sign language in its federal constitution: since 2011, the Hungarian constitution explicitly protects Hungarian Sign Language (HSL) as part of Hungarian culture. In 2020, supporting acts were amended to strengthen HSL-medium education rights and to place HSL on equal footing with spoken Hungarian in state-recognized examinations. The Hungarian Deaf community is described as the third largest linguistic and cultural minority in the country. Universal newborn hearing screening using automated auditory brainstem response (AABR) has been running for over five years, with data published in a 2022 PMC study documenting its diagnostic outcomes.

Despite constitutional recognition, practical gaps remain. A Roma population study (PMC4401708) documented elevated prevalence of genetic hearing loss — including MARVELD2/DFNB49 mutations — among Central European Roma communities, who often face additional barriers to accessing hearing health services. In rural areas outside Budapest and the larger cities, HSL interpreter provision is thin. The constitutional right to sign language does not automatically translate into an interpreter being present at a family dinner or a neighbourhood gathering.

The daily domestic gap is where most deaf and hard of hearing Hungarians feel exclusion most acutely. Family conversations happen in the fast, informal Hungarian of home — the Hungarian with dropped unstressed syllables, geminate contrasts, and long agglutinated words that make lip-reading demanding even for skilled practitioners. No constitutional guarantee covers those moments. A deaf or HoH Hungarian at the family table navigates them through a combination of lip-reading, residual hearing, and reliance on hearing family members to bridge what they miss.

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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

"Hungarian at the dinner table is fast and the long words are impossible to lip-read fully. Captio AI reads my family's speech in real time and I follow the whole conversation — not just the parts where someone faced me."

Kata V. 🇭🇺
kata.v***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks fast Budapest Hungarian at home, Budapest

"My partner's vowels from Debrecen sound and look different from Budapest Hungarian. I kept missing familiar words. Captio AI reads both varieties correctly and our evenings at home are relaxed."

Péter S. 🇭🇺
peter.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from Debrecen speaks eastern Hungarian, Budapest

"My colleagues talk fast in the regional Hungarian of Debrecen and nobody always faces me. Captio AI captions their speech in real time and I follow desk conversations without needing written summaries."

Erzsébet M. 🇭🇺
erzsebet.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues in Debrecen office, Debrecen

"My grandchildren talk fast and informal and the geminate words blend into each other. Captio AI reads their speech and I understand them without needing them to slow down for me."

László N. 🇭🇺
laszlo.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 65, grandchildren speak fast colloquial Hungarian, Pécs

"Hungarian at the dinner table is fast and the long words are impossible to lip-read fully. Captio AI reads my family's speech in real time and I follow the whole conversation — not just the parts where someone faced me."

Kata V. 🇭🇺
kata.v***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks fast Budapest Hungarian at home, Budapest

"My partner's vowels from Debrecen sound and look different from Budapest Hungarian. I kept missing familiar words. Captio AI reads both varieties correctly and our evenings at home are relaxed."

Péter S. 🇭🇺
peter.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner from Debrecen speaks eastern Hungarian, Budapest

"My colleagues talk fast in the regional Hungarian of Debrecen and nobody always faces me. Captio AI captions their speech in real time and I follow desk conversations without needing written summaries."

Erzsébet M. 🇭🇺
erzsebet.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing colleagues in Debrecen office, Debrecen

"My grandchildren talk fast and informal and the geminate words blend into each other. Captio AI reads their speech and I understand them without needing them to slow down for me."

László N. 🇭🇺
laszlo.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing at 65, grandchildren speak fast colloquial Hungarian, Pécs

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Hungarian.

Captio AI is free to start

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