Romanian live captions and productivity tool for communicating with deaf & hoh
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Romanian communicating with deaf & hoh
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Romanian speakers.
You speak. They read.
- Your words appear on their screen word by word
- No sign language required from you
- Works at home, at work, anywhere
- Any accent, any pace
When language is also a barrier
- You speak your language, they read in theirs
- Translates in real time as you speak
- 60+ languages, no setup
- Handles mid-sentence switches
Save the conversation for them
- Record and transcribe any exchange
- They can review everything at their own pace
- Organised by speaker
- Any length, any format
Make sure nothing important was missed
- Key points extracted from any transcript
- Useful after appointments, meetings, or important conversations
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Romanian families talk around the table in the warm, rapid cadence of everyday home life. Captio AI captions your hearing family's Romanian in real time so you follow the full conversation — not just the sentences where someone remembered to face you.
In a Bucharest or Cluj office, colleagues exchange quick questions and hallway comments in fast everyday Romanian. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so your deaf or hard of hearing colleague follows informal exchanges and desk-side conversations.
When your partner is hearing and speaks Romanian naturally, Captio AI closes the gap. They talk at their normal pace; you read every word. Daily conversation at home becomes effortless.
Morning exchanges over coffee, questions from the other room, comments in front of the news. Captio AI covers the small daily Romanian moments that add up to connection — in a Bucharest apartment, a house in Cluj, or a family home in the villages.
When you meet a hearing Romanian speaker for the first time, Captio AI starts immediately. They speak; you read. No awkward explanations, no searching for a way to communicate.
At a family gathering, a christening, a wedding celebration, or a neighbour's visit, people talk over each other and the room fills with noise. Captio AI captions whoever you point your phone at so you are included rather than peripheral.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
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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.
Why Romanian is hard to understand
Twin invisible central vowels
- Romanian's two central vowels ă and â both produce a nearly neutral mouth position with no visible lip distinction
- Romanian has two high-frequency central vowels — ă (schwa-like /ə/) and â (the high central /ɨ/) — both produced with a nearly neutral, unrounded mouth position. On the lips, neither has the distinctive rounded shape of /o/ or the spread shape of /e/. Since ă appears in the most common suffixes in the language and â marks key root forms, a deaf or HoH person watching lip shapes has almost no visual basis to distinguish them.
Complex consonant clusters
- Romanian permits heavy consonant clusters at word edges that compress multiple closures into a rapid, hard-to-read sequence
- Romanian allows clusters like str-, zvâcnit, and contracted forms like 'mpreună. These cluster-heavy syllables produce rapid successive closures at the face — difficult to segment into individual sounds even for trained lipreaders, and especially hard to catch in fast conversational speech at a family table.
Moldovan–Romanian phonological split
- Moldovan Romanian introduces vowel shifts and loanwords that make familiar words look different on the lips
- The Romanian spoken in Moldova differs from standard Romanian in vowel quality and incorporates Russian and Ukrainian loanwords. In families with members from both Romania and Moldova — common given the shared cultural sphere — a deaf or HoH person calibrated to one variety may find that familiar words in the other look different on the lips due to shifted vowel articulation.
Diphthong alternation in morphology
- Romanian alternates between vowels and diphthongs in related word forms, making the same root look different on the lips
- Romanian roots frequently alternate between a monophthong and a diphthong as inflection changes — soare/soar, seară/seri. This means the same root looks different on the lips in different grammatical forms. A deaf or HoH person learns to expect consistency within a word family; Romanian disrupts this expectation systematically.
Fast colloquial reduction
- Colloquial Romanian drops syllables and assimilates consonants at a pace that undermines lip-reading
- In fast informal speech, Romanian speakers drop final -e, assimilate adjacent consonants, and reduce unstressed syllables. These reductions happen at the dinner table and in the kitchen — the natural pace of spoken Romanian is significantly faster and more compressed than textbook pronunciation, and the gap between the two is felt most acutely by a deaf or HoH family member.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Romania: prevalence, policy, and daily access gaps
Congenital hearing loss in Romania is reported at a prevalence of 1 to 3 per 1,000 newborns, consistent with European estimates. A study published in PMC (PMC6974846) examined the clinical and environmental risk factors for congenital sensorineural hearing loss in the Romanian population, finding that perinatal complications, low birth weight, and neonatal infections were significant contributing factors — each linked to gaps in neonatal care infrastructure that affect rural and lower-income populations more severely. Across all age groups, the age-related hearing loss burden is substantial: the GBD 2019 study estimated approximately one in five people globally have hearing loss, a figure that translates to roughly five million Romanians.
Romanian Sign Language has an active user community — a SIL sociolinguistic survey documented the structure and social position of the Romanian deaf community — but its formal legal status remains limited. Unlike Czech (recognized 2008) or Hungary (constitutionally protected since 2011), Romania does not have a law that formally recognises Romanian Sign Language as a language or establishes a right to interpretation in public settings. Deaf and hard of hearing Romanians seeking interpretation must typically arrange it privately, and access outside Bucharest is very limited.
In daily domestic life, the gap is most visible in informal settings: family meals, conversations in the apartment stairwell, exchanges with neighbours, and the ordinary back-and-forth of living with hearing family members. These settings are not covered by any formal provision. Deaf and hard of hearing Romanians navigate them through lip-reading, gesturing, and dependence on hearing relatives — strategies that are exhausting over a full day and that leave significant portions of conversation unrecovered.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"My family talks fast at the table and the ă and â sounds all look the same to me. Captio AI reads their Romanian in real time and I follow the whole dinner conversation now, not just fragments."
"My partner's Moldovan Romanian has different sounds and some Russian words I don't expect. Captio AI reads both varieties correctly and our evenings at home are easy now."
"My colleagues talk fast at their desks and nobody always faces me. Captio AI captions their Romanian in real time and I follow work conversations without asking for written summaries."
"My grandchildren speak the quick informal Romanian of young people and I was missing most of it. Captio AI reads their speech and I understand them without asking them to slow down or repeat."
"My family talks fast at the table and the ă and â sounds all look the same to me. Captio AI reads their Romanian in real time and I follow the whole dinner conversation now, not just fragments."
"My partner's Moldovan Romanian has different sounds and some Russian words I don't expect. Captio AI reads both varieties correctly and our evenings at home are easy now."
"My colleagues talk fast at their desks and nobody always faces me. Captio AI captions their Romanian in real time and I follow work conversations without asking for written summaries."
"My grandchildren speak the quick informal Romanian of young people and I was missing most of it. Captio AI reads their speech and I understand them without asking them to slow down or repeat."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Make every conversation work — for both sides in Romanian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store