Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Croatian live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

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.

🏪Counter conversations

Ljekarna counter, pošta window, supermarket checkout, gradski ured desk. Staff speak fast in Croatian and move on. Captio AI shows what they said before the moment passes.

🍽️Group conversations

Sunday family ručak, birthday celebration, komšiluk gathering. Multiple generations, fast Croatian, Zagreb versus Dalmatian accents mixing. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

Asking for directions in the city, chatting with a neighbour in the stubištu, meeting someone at the tržnica. People who speak at full conversational pace. Captio AI captions anyone near you.

Informal work moments

Pauza za kavu conversation, a quick question in the hodniku, catch-up before a meeting. The moments Croatian workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Dom zdravlja reception, gradski ured counter, bank branch, HZMO office. Formal vocabulary, fast delivery, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

Tram and bus announcements in Zagreb, asking at a kolodvor, taxi driver conversation. Situations where you need to understand the first time. Captio AI covers you anywhere.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Croatian
90.5%

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

Built for conversations that don't wait

Captions as they speak, not after

Captio AI shows each word as it is spoken. You read what the person is saying while they are still saying it — not after they have finished and moved on.

No lip reading needed

You do not need to face the speaker or position yourself to see their mouth. Captio AI picks up speech from any direction — across a counter, at a table, in a busy street.

Works through background noise

Restaurants, pharmacies, busy streets, crowded waiting rooms. Captio AI separates speech from background noise so captions stay accurate where everyday conversations actually happen.

Follows any conversation

One person or six. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking at any moment — so you follow the thread at a dinner table or keep up with a counter exchange without losing track.

Any accent, any pace

People do not slow down or enunciate for you. Captio AI handles fast talkers, regional accents, and casual speech — the way people actually talk in real life.

Any language, no setup

When someone speaks a language you do not know, switch to Live Translator. They speak their language — you read in yours. No configuration needed. Works in 60+ languages.

Croatian

Why Croatian is hard to understand

Four pitch accent types

  • Standard Croatian uses four pitch accents — short rising, short falling, long rising, long falling — all acoustic
  • Standard Croatian (and Serbian and Bosnian) uses a pitch accent system with four types: short rising, short falling, long rising, and long falling. These accents distinguish word meaning. They are carried entirely in the voice — no visible lip movement reflects them. For a deaf lip-reader, pitch-accent distinctions are systematically invisible, and word-level ambiguity is constant in every Croatian conversation.

Dialect fragmentation

  • Zagreb speech, Split Dalmatian, and Slavonian Croatian each present a different lip-reading target
  • Croatian has three major dialect groups: Štokavian (standard, central), Čakavian (coastal Dalmatia and islands), and Kajkavian (Zagreb and northwestern Croatia). In practice, everyday Zagreb speech sounds nothing like the speech of Split or the Dalmatian coast, and island varieties differ again. A deaf person who has learned to lip-read Zagreb Croatian will lose accuracy significantly when visiting the Dalmatian coast or the islands.

Italian code-switching

  • Coastal Croatian speech mixes Croatian and Italian-derived vocabulary
  • Dalmatian coastal cities — Split, Dubrovnik, Zadar, Šibenik — have centuries of Venetian-Italian influence that persist in everyday vocabulary and borrowings. Elderly coastal speakers may code-switch with Italian words; younger speakers use Italian-origin words naturally in Croatian. For a deaf person, this unexpected Italian-origin vocabulary creates additional ambiguity in everyday coastal conversations.

Kafić noise culture

  • Croatian kafić culture is the social centre — and it is loud, fast, and overlapping
  • The kafić (café) is central to Croatian daily social life — not just coffee, but the setting where most informal daily social interaction happens. Croatian kafić conversations are intense, fast, and overlapping, with background music and hard surfaces amplifying noise. For a deaf or hard of hearing Croatian, the kafić is the most important social setting and the most acoustically impenetrable.

Limited rural access

  • Croatian Sign Language interpreters are concentrated in Zagreb — in most of Croatia everyday accessibility is absent
  • There are approximately 60 Croatian Sign Language (HZJ) interpreters serving the entire country — heavily concentrated in Zagreb. Outside the capital, deaf Croatians navigating a daily kafić conversation, a market transaction, or a family meal have no access to any formal sign language support whatsoever.

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The Challenge

13,230 hearing-impaired Croatians. 60 HZJ interpreters for the whole country. No captions at the kafić, the tržnica, or the family konoba.

The 2011 Croatian Census identified 13,230 people with hearing impairment, with 2,763 having total or major disability. An estimated 6,500 people use Croatian Sign Language (HZJ) as their primary language — and the country has approximately 60 certified HZJ interpreters serving the entire population. Research published in PMC on deaf education in Croatia noted that most deaf people in Croatia are born to hearing parents who do not learn to sign, resulting in deaf children growing up isolated from both family communication and broader community. For deaf Croatians, daily life involves the kafić, the tržnica, the bus, and the family meal — all built on oral Croatian exchange with no captioning and no sign language support outside Zagreb.

A PMC study on deaf education in Croatia found that communication through classical written means is 'often greatly hampered by modest vocabulary and agrammatism' — reflecting the language acquisition gaps that arise when deaf children grow up without accessible language models. Deaf adults who navigate Croatian society do so with communication skills built under difficult conditions. The kafić — the social institution around which Croatian daily life is organised — remains entirely inaccessible without hearing: it is fast, loud, dialect-varied, and unreachable by formal interpretation services.

Croatian's four-accent pitch system and three major dialect groups create specific structural challenges for deaf lip-readers. A deaf person who has calibrated to Zagreb speech encounters a different phonological system in Split or on the islands — and neither is covered by any captioning technology until now. The large Croatian diaspora in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland means many deaf Croatians live in bilingual Croatian-German environments where everyday conversation code-switches unpredictably. Captio AI captions Croatian speech in real time — including Zagreb Kajkavian, Dalmatian Čakavian, and fast kafić colloquial Croatian — so the market, the waterfront, and the family Sunday meal are no longer settings you have to experience from the outside.

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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

"The kafić is where Croatian social life happens. Captio AI captions the fast Zagreb Croatian. I go to the kafić with friends and follow the whole conversation now."

Ivana P. 🇭🇷
ivana.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Zagreb

"Split Dalmatian sounds nothing like Zagreb Croatian. Captio AI handles both. The tržnica and the riva are places I navigate completely alone."

Marko B. 🇭🇷
marko.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Split

"Rijeka Croatian has Italian-influenced vocabulary. Captio AI follows it. Family Sunday konoba meals are conversations I actually participate in now."

Ana K. 🇭🇷
ana.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Rijeka

"The waterfront riva conversations in Dubrovnik are fast Dalmatian. Captio AI captions them. I meet neighbours and friends on the riva and follow everything."

Tomislav V. 🇭🇷
tomislav.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dubrovnik

"The kafić is where Croatian social life happens. Captio AI captions the fast Zagreb Croatian. I go to the kafić with friends and follow the whole conversation now."

Ivana P. 🇭🇷
ivana.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Zagreb

"Split Dalmatian sounds nothing like Zagreb Croatian. Captio AI handles both. The tržnica and the riva are places I navigate completely alone."

Marko B. 🇭🇷
marko.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Split

"Rijeka Croatian has Italian-influenced vocabulary. Captio AI follows it. Family Sunday konoba meals are conversations I actually participate in now."

Ana K. 🇭🇷
ana.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Rijeka

"The waterfront riva conversations in Dubrovnik are fast Dalmatian. Captio AI captions them. I meet neighbours and friends on the riva and follow everything."

Tomislav V. 🇭🇷
tomislav.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Dubrovnik

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Croatian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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