Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Macedonian 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 Macedonian family meal in Skopje, Bitola, or Ohrid where grandparents speak a village dialect, parents use Standard Macedonian, and teenagers mix in English. Captio AI captions every voice at the table.

💼As a hearing colleague

A Macedonian household where conversations happen spontaneously — morning questions, remarks across the apartment, quick exchanges with 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 an eastern Macedonian dialect quite different from the standard variety. Captio AI captions their speech correctly so home life does not require extra effort.

🏠Living together

Spontaneous exchanges at the neighbourhood market, bakery, or pharmacy in Skopje. Captio AI captions what the person behind the counter is saying in real time.

🤝Introducing someone new

A Macedonian gathering — a family slava, a wedding, or a neighbourhood celebration — where people from different parts of the country speak and dialects mix. Captio AI captions the conversation so a deaf or hard of hearing person is part of it.

👥Mixed group settings

Meeting a partner's family for the first time, where the Macedonian spoken is strongly regional. Captio AI captures the conversation so the first meeting can be natural.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Macedonian
87.6%

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.

Macedonian

Why Macedonian is hard to understand

Eastern dialect divergence

  • Eastern Macedonian dialects share features with Bulgarian — different vowels, different patterns
  • Eastern Macedonian dialects, spoken in the eastern part of the country, share phonological features with Bulgarian — different vowel qualities, different consonant patterns, different prosodic profiles. A deaf person calibrated to Standard Macedonian (based on the western Ohrid-Bitola dialect) encounters a substantially different phonological profile from eastern speakers.

Fixed antepenultimate stress

  • Macedonian stress always falls on the third-from-last syllable — creating unusual rhythm
  • Unlike most Slavic languages, Macedonian stress is fixed — it falls on the third-from-last syllable in polysyllabic words, and on the first syllable in shorter words. This creates a distinctive rhythmic pattern in connected speech that a deaf person calibrated to a free-stress Slavic language must adapt to.

Schwa vowel variation

  • The schwa /ə/ is present in some dialects but absent in others — creating cross-dialect homophones
  • Macedonian has a schwa vowel present in the standard language and in some dialects, realized differently or absent in others. This creates phonological mismatches across the three dialect groups — Western, Eastern, and Northern — where the same word has different vowel profiles depending on the speaker's region.

Palatal consonants

  • /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ are produced inside the mouth with no surface lip trace
  • Macedonian has palatal consonants /ɲ/ (written as 'њ') and /ʎ/ (written as 'љ') — sounds produced with the tongue raised toward the hard palate, with no external lip involvement. Words distinguished by their presence are visually identical to a lip reader.

Northern dialect Serbian influence

  • Northern Macedonian dialects show Serbian prosodic influence — neither Macedonian nor Serbian fully
  • Northern Macedonian dialects, particularly near the Kosovo and Serbian borders, show Serbian phonological influence — different prosodic patterns and consonant realizations from the standard. A deaf person who has calibrated from Standard Macedonian encounters patterns in northern speech that match neither the standard Macedonian nor full Serbian prosody.

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The Challenge

North Macedonia's deaf community navigates daily life without constitutional sign language recognition — and an estimated 100,000+ people live with hearing loss.

North Macedonia has a population of approximately 2 million people. The GBD 2019 study (PMC7960691) estimated that disabling hearing loss affects approximately 5–6% of the global population across all age groups, with Eastern European countries broadly aligned with this prevalence — suggesting between 100,000 and 130,000 people in North Macedonia with some degree of hearing loss. Joshua Project data estimate the deaf signing community at approximately 15,000 people.

Macedonian Sign Language (MZJ) has limited formal legislative recognition in North Macedonia. Advocacy by disability organizations has pushed for formal recognition for decades, but the language lacks the constitutional or legislative standing achieved by sign languages in neighbouring Slovenia or Croatia. The gap between informal practice — where deaf Macedonians use MZJ within their community — and formal recognition in schools, courts, and health settings creates a persistent barrier to full social participation.

Social exclusion for deaf people in North Macedonia is concentrated in informal daily communication. A country where family life centres on home gatherings, neighbourhood relationships, and seasonal celebrations makes informal communication access particularly significant. The availability of qualified sign language interpreters outside Skopje is limited, making everyday self-advocacy difficult and reinforcing isolation in the home settings where a deaf person spends most of their time.

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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 eastern Macedonian — different vowel patterns from Skopje Macedonian. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and I follow the full family dinner now."

Biljana S. 🇲🇰
biljana.s***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks eastern Macedonian dialect, Štip

"My partner's family is from Bitola and speaks the southwestern Macedonian variety. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family visits are easy."

Aleksandar T. 🇲🇰
aleksandar.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner's family from Bitola, Skopje

"Conversations in the building happen fast and informally. Captio AI captions everything in real time so I can follow building announcements and corridor conversations."

Elena V. 🇲🇰
elena.v***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing neighbours in Skopje apartment block, Skopje

"Relatives from the north speak Macedonian with Serbian influence. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family gatherings are easy."

Dragan P. 🇲🇰
dragan.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, family celebrations with relatives from northern Macedonia, Kumanovo

"My family speaks eastern Macedonian — different vowel patterns from Skopje Macedonian. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and I follow the full family dinner now."

Biljana S. 🇲🇰
biljana.s***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family speaks eastern Macedonian dialect, Štip

"My partner's family is from Bitola and speaks the southwestern Macedonian variety. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family visits are easy."

Aleksandar T. 🇲🇰
aleksandar.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, hearing partner's family from Bitola, Skopje

"Conversations in the building happen fast and informally. Captio AI captions everything in real time so I can follow building announcements and corridor conversations."

Elena V. 🇲🇰
elena.v***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing neighbours in Skopje apartment block, Skopje

"Relatives from the north speak Macedonian with Serbian influence. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and family gatherings are easy."

Dragan P. 🇲🇰
dragan.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, family celebrations with relatives from northern Macedonia, Kumanovo

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Macedonian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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