Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Czech live captions and productivity tool for doctor appointments

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.

🩺GP and primary care visits

At a praktický lékař (GP surgery) in Prague, Brno, or a regional town, your doctor explains a diagnosis in Czech. Captio AI captions every word in real time so you follow the full consultation.

🔬Specialist consultations

At a specialist appointment at a fakultní nemocnice (university hospital) or regional hospital, medical terminology arrives in Czech mixed with Latinate clinical vocabulary. Captio AI captions both.

💊Pharmacy conversations

At the lékárna (pharmacy), the pharmacist explains dosage and interactions quickly in Czech. Point your phone toward them and read the instructions as they speak.

🦷Dental appointments

At a stomatologická klinika (dental clinic), the dentist gives instructions during treatment when lip-reading is impossible. Captio AI captions from audio alone so you follow every direction.

🧠Mental health sessions

In a mental health session with a psycholog or psychiatr, sensitive conversations require full comprehension. Captio AI captions the entire session so you engage without missing nuance.

🚑Emergency and urgent care

At the pohotovost (emergency department), staff speak quickly under pressure. Open Captio AI and read their instructions in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Czech
90.3%

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

Built for the conversations where every word matters

Captions as the doctor speaks

Words appear on screen while the doctor is still talking. You read the diagnosis, drug name, or follow-up instruction at the same moment it is said — not after they have moved on.

Medical terminology handled accurately

Drug names, procedure names, clinical terms. Captio AI handles the vocabulary of a real consultation — not just everyday speech.

Review the appointment after

Record the consultation and upload it to Audio Transcription. Get a full written record of everything said — instructions, dosages, referrals — to review at home and share with a carer if needed.

Works in any clinical setting

Consultation rooms, hospital wards, A&E, dental chairs, pharmacy counters. Place the phone near the speaker and Captio AI captions whoever is talking.

Any language

For foreign-language doctors, specialists abroad, or appointments through an interpreter. Live Translator captions and translates in real time so you follow your diagnosis in the language you understand best.

100% private

Medical conversations are among the most sensitive there are. Captio AI processes audio in real time and discards it immediately. Nothing is recorded, stored, or shared.

Czech

Why Czech is hard to understand

Consonant clusters

  • Czech consonant clusters have no visible vowels to anchor them
  • Czech permits multi-consonant words with no vowels at all — 'čtvrt' (quarter), 'scvrknout' (to shrink), 'třista' (three hundred). In medical speech, long words dense with consonant clusters produce a rapid sequence of lip closures and tongue placements with no open-mouth vowel shape for a deaf patient to anchor to. A cluster-heavy clinical term can pass in under a second of near-invisible articulation.

Vowel length contrast

  • Long and short vowels look identical on the lips
  • Czech contrasts short and long vowels — 'pas' (passport) vs 'pás' (belt), 'rada' (advice) vs 'ráda' (gladly). Length is phonemically meaningful, including in medical vocabulary, but produces no visible difference in lip shape. A deaf patient lip-reading Czech sees the same mouth movement for two different words, with no visual cue to distinguish them.

Bohemian vs Moravian gap

  • Moravian dialects differ markedly from Prague Czech
  • Czech has three dialect groups in Bohemia and four in Moravia and Silesia. Moravian dialects show distinct vowel qualities, intonation patterns, and lexical preferences from Standard Czech (based on Bohemian). A deaf patient who learned to lip-read Bohemian Czech will find Moravian-speaking medical staff in Brno or Ostrava producing unfamiliar mouth shapes for familiar words.

Medical register mix

  • Clinical speech mixes Czech with Latin and German loanwords
  • Czech clinical vocabulary carries strong Latin and German-origin layers from Central European medical tradition. A doctor alternates between Czech explanations and Latinate diagnostic terminology — 'hypertenze', 'myokard infarkt' — producing shifts in phonological register within a single sentence. A deaf patient must lip-read across two phonological systems in the same consultation.

Fast speech reduction

  • Casual Czech speech reduces and elides heavily
  • In informal clinical conversation, Czech speech reduces colloquially — 'budu' becomes 'budu', unstressed syllables drop, and words merge across boundaries. After the formal diagnosis part of a consultation, a doctor who shifts to conversational speed for aftercare instructions produces speech that is significantly harder to segment from lip shapes alone.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in the Czech Republic: small interpreter workforce, real daily gaps

About 15,000 people in the Czech Republic were either born with hearing loss or acquired it in childhood, with approximately 8,000 having significant or complete deafness. Of these, around 10,000 use Czech Sign Language as their primary means of communication. Against this need, only 70 working sign language interpreters are available nationally — a ratio of one interpreter for every 143 signing deaf people. Czech Sign Language emerged around the founding of the first deaf school in Bohemia in 1786, making it one of the older European sign languages, but its user community remains chronically underserved in interpreter provision. Universal newborn hearing screening was only introduced in 2012, meaning cohorts of deaf Czechs who reached adulthood before that date did so without early audiological support.

The interpreter shortage has direct consequences in education and healthcare. Many deaf Czechs are channelled into menial employment because the interpreter workforce is too small to support access to higher education and advanced training. In healthcare, the practical result is that a deaf patient attending a specialist consultation at a fakultní nemocnice has no guarantee of a qualified interpreter. The options — a family member, a written exchange, or a doctor willing to speak slowly — each degrade the quality and completeness of clinical communication in different ways. A diagnosis explained through a family member is filtered; one communicated via written notes is abbreviated; one delivered by a slow-speaking doctor is often still missed by lip-reading.

The gap between the legal recognition of Czech Sign Language and the interpreter capacity to deliver that right is the defining structural problem for deaf Czechs in healthcare settings. Czech Sign Language has formal educational and legal recognition, but the infrastructure to make that recognition meaningful in everyday settings — including medical appointments — is incomplete. Captio AI captions Czech in real time at any praktický lékař surgery or nemocnice, providing deaf and hard of hearing Czechs direct access to their doctor's words without depending on a workforce that has fewer than 70 people serving thousands of patients.

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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 internista at Vinohradská nemocnice speaks very fast Czech and runs through vowel-length distinctions that I simply cannot see on anyone's lips. Captio AI captions the full consultation and I understand my treatment without guessing which of two words was said."

Kateřina Nováková 🇨🇿
katerina.n***@gmail.com
Severe sensorineural hearing loss, Prague

"In Brno the doctors speak Moravian Czech — different rhythm and vowel qualities from Prague. My cochlear implant helps but I miss clinical terms. Captio AI captions everything including the Latinate diagnostic vocabulary that my doctor switches to mid-sentence."

Tomáš Dvořák 🇨🇿
tomas.d***@gmail.com
Bilateral hearing loss, cochlear implant, Brno

"The pharmacist at my lékárna in Ostrava speaks Silesian-accented Czech and runs through interactions very quickly. Captio AI captions every instruction and I know exactly what I'm not supposed to take alongside my prescription."

Petra Horáčková 🇨🇿
petra.h***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Ostrava

"There are only 70 interpreters in the whole country. Waiting for one means weeks. Captio AI means I don't wait — I go to my psychiatrické ambulantní oddělení appointment and read the entire session in real time."

Ondřej Procházka 🇨🇿
ondrej.p***@gmail.com
Profound deafness, Olomouc

"My internista at Vinohradská nemocnice speaks very fast Czech and runs through vowel-length distinctions that I simply cannot see on anyone's lips. Captio AI captions the full consultation and I understand my treatment without guessing which of two words was said."

Kateřina Nováková 🇨🇿
katerina.n***@gmail.com
Severe sensorineural hearing loss, Prague

"In Brno the doctors speak Moravian Czech — different rhythm and vowel qualities from Prague. My cochlear implant helps but I miss clinical terms. Captio AI captions everything including the Latinate diagnostic vocabulary that my doctor switches to mid-sentence."

Tomáš Dvořák 🇨🇿
tomas.d***@gmail.com
Bilateral hearing loss, cochlear implant, Brno

"The pharmacist at my lékárna in Ostrava speaks Silesian-accented Czech and runs through interactions very quickly. Captio AI captions every instruction and I know exactly what I'm not supposed to take alongside my prescription."

Petra Horáčková 🇨🇿
petra.h***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Ostrava

"There are only 70 interpreters in the whole country. Waiting for one means weeks. Captio AI means I don't wait — I go to my psychiatrické ambulantní oddělení appointment and read the entire session in real time."

Ondřej Procházka 🇨🇿
ondrej.p***@gmail.com
Profound deafness, Olomouc

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Understand your diagnosis in Czech.

Captio AI is free to start

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