Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Slovak 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 Slovak family table where grandparents speak an eastern Slovak dialect, parents use standard Slovak, and young family members mix in Czech or English words. Captio AI keeps up across all varieties.

💼As a hearing colleague

Slovak workplaces blend formal standard Slovak with regional spoken patterns. Captio AI lets a deaf colleague follow team discussions, corridor conversations, and the informal banter that shapes working relationships.

❤️Partners and relationships

A hearing partner who grew up speaking eastern Slovak can speak naturally at home. Captio AI captions their speech in real time so conversation does not depend on note-writing or asking for repetitions.

🏠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 Slovak household.

🤝Introducing someone new

Meeting a hearing Slovak family member, neighbour, or new acquaintance. Captio AI captures their speech in real time so the introduction can be natural.

👥Mixed group settings

At a Slovak family celebration, village fair, or group dinner where voices overlap and conversation moves fast, Captio AI captions the conversation so a deaf or hard of hearing person stays part of it.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Slovak
91.5%

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.

Slovak

Why Slovak is hard to understand

Syllabic liquids

  • Entire syllables built from consonants with no lip-readable vowel
  • Slovak uses syllabic /r/ and /l/ as vowel nuclei — words like 'krk' (neck), 'vlk' (wolf), and 'vrch' (peak) contain no vowel phoneme at all. A deaf or hard of hearing lip reader sees only consonant positions with no vowel movement to track.

Phonemic vowel length

  • Long and short vowels look identical from outside
  • Slovak has contrastive vowel length — 'draha' (track) vs 'dráha' (career). The distinction is purely temporal: a short and a long version of the same vowel position the lips identically. A lip reader receives no visual signal for a contrast that is semantically critical in Slovak.

Eastern stress shift

  • Eastern Slovak has penultimate stress — a completely different rhythm
  • Standard Slovak has fixed initial stress on the first syllable. Eastern Slovak dialects — spoken by several hundred thousand people — have penultimate stress. The rhythm of speech changes completely: different syllables are lengthened, different syllables compressed. A lip reader calibrated to standard Slovak encounters an unfamiliar prosodic pattern from eastern speakers.

Eastern dialect divergence

  • Eastern Slovak is distinct enough to form its own dialect zone
  • Eastern Slovak dialects differ from standard Slovak in vowel inventory, consonant patterns, and prosody to a degree that speakers of standard Slovak find them difficult to follow. For a deaf or hard of hearing person, the visual patterns of lip movement from an eastern speaker do not match what they have learned to recognise from broadcast standard speech.

Slovak–Hungarian switching

  • Southern Slovakia has large Hungarian-speaking communities
  • In southern Slovakia, Hungarian and Slovak co-occur throughout everyday life. Many speakers shift between the two languages without signalling the change. A deaf or hard of hearing person who has learned Slovak lip-reading patterns suddenly encounters Hungarian vowel harmony, agglutinative word structure, and Hungarian phonemes in the same conversation.

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The Challenge

In Slovakia, high Roma hearing loss prevalence compounds a communication access gap that standard services do not reach.

Slovakia's deaf and hard of hearing population navigates a system where Slovak Sign Language has been legally recognised since 1995, but formal interpreter provision has not kept pace with need. A recent study (PMC12383956) documented a high prevalence of Alport syndrome — a genetic condition that causes progressive sensorineural hearing loss alongside kidney disease — in the Roma population of eastern Slovakia, reflecting the broader pattern of elevated hereditary hearing loss rates in communities with limited access to newborn screening and early intervention.

Roma communities in eastern Slovakia represent one of the largest and most socially marginalised ethnic minority groups in Europe. The intersection of genetic hearing loss risk, poverty, limited access to specialist ear care, and low educational completion rates creates a compounding access gap: deaf or hard of hearing Roma children in eastern Slovakia are the least likely to receive early diagnosis, appropriate education, or community interpreter support. The geographic overlap with eastern Slovak dialect territory means these families also navigate a distinct regional phonological system in addition to every other barrier.

More broadly, global burden data (GBD 2019, PMC7960691) estimates 1.5 billion people live with hearing loss worldwide, with prevalence highest in contexts of limited health infrastructure. Slovakia, as a post-transition economy, has made progress in hearing healthcare but retains significant rural-urban gaps — particularly in the eastern regions where both dialect divergence and elevated genetic hearing loss rates cluster together.

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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 is from eastern Slovakia and their dialect has a different rhythm from the standard Slovak I learned. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and I follow the full family dinner now."

Zuzana H. 🇸🇰
zuzana.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family from eastern Slovakia uses eastern dialect, Bratislava

"My colleagues speak Košice Slovak — penultimate stress, different vowels. Captio AI keeps me in those conversations without anyone needing to slow down."

Martin K. 🇸🇰
martin.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, eastern Slovak hearing colleagues and family, Košice

"My partner's family switches between eastern dialect and standard Slovak depending on who is in the room. Captio AI handles both and I follow the conversation without missing the switches."

Eva N. 🇸🇰
eva.n***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing partner speaks standard Slovak but family speaks eastern, Prešov

"My family gatherings mix Slovak and Czech — relatives from both sides of the border. Captio AI handles both languages and I am part of the conversation."

Tomáš B. 🇸🇰
tomas.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Slovak–Czech family gatherings with mixed speech, Žilina

"My family is from eastern Slovakia and their dialect has a different rhythm from the standard Slovak I learned. Captio AI reads their speech correctly and I follow the full family dinner now."

Zuzana H. 🇸🇰
zuzana.h***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing family from eastern Slovakia uses eastern dialect, Bratislava

"My colleagues speak Košice Slovak — penultimate stress, different vowels. Captio AI keeps me in those conversations without anyone needing to slow down."

Martin K. 🇸🇰
martin.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, eastern Slovak hearing colleagues and family, Košice

"My partner's family switches between eastern dialect and standard Slovak depending on who is in the room. Captio AI handles both and I follow the conversation without missing the switches."

Eva N. 🇸🇰
eva.n***@gmail.com
Deaf, hearing partner speaks standard Slovak but family speaks eastern, Prešov

"My family gatherings mix Slovak and Czech — relatives from both sides of the border. Captio AI handles both languages and I am part of the conversation."

Tomáš B. 🇸🇰
tomas.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Slovak–Czech family gatherings with mixed speech, Žilina

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Make every conversation work — for both sides in Slovak.

Captio AI is free to start

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