Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hungarian live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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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.

🏪Counter conversations

Gyógyszertár counter, posta window, supermarket checkout, hivatal desk. Staff speak fast in Hungarian and move to the next person. Captio AI shows what they said before the moment passes.

🍽️Group conversations

Sunday family ebéd, birthday celebration, neighbourhood gathering. Multiple generations, fast overlapping Hungarian, regional accents mixing. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

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

Informal work moments

Kávészünet conversation, a quick question in the folyosón, catch-up before a meeting. The moments Hungarian workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Háziorvos reception, okmányiroda counter, bank branch, post office. Formal vocabulary, fast delivery, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hungarian
94.4%

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.

Hungarian

Why Hungarian is hard to understand

Extreme agglutination

  • Hungarian stacks up to 20 grammatical suffixes onto a single word — all invisible on the lips
  • Hungarian is one of the most agglutinative languages in Europe. Tense, case, person, possession, negation, and directionality are all expressed through suffixes stacked onto the word stem. At conversational speed, these chains of suffixes blur together into an undifferentiated stream of similar mouth shapes. Critical meaning — the difference between 'I went' and 'he didn't go there without me' — is entirely acoustic, not visible.

No European language relatives

  • Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric isolate — the phoneme set is unlike any neighbouring language
  • Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric family and has no significant linguistic relationship to the German, Slovak, Romanian, and Croatian languages that surround it. This means deaf or hard of hearing people who have developed lip-reading skills in a neighbouring language cannot transfer any of that skill to Hungarian. The language is a fresh start for every lip-reader.

Fast spoken Budapest pace

  • Everyday Budapest Hungarian is substantially faster than the formal register
  • Spoken Budapest Hungarian at natural conversational pace is significantly compressed compared to formal or written Hungarian. Word endings blur, vowels reduce, and informal slang vocabulary diverges sharply from textbook Hungarian. A deaf person who has learned to lip-read formal Hungarian finds everyday Budapest conversation a different challenge entirely.

Ruin bar culture

  • Hungary's romkocsma (ruin bar) culture creates impossible acoustic conditions
  • Budapest's ruin bars — now a major part of Hungarian urban social life — feature music, hard exposed surfaces, and dense crowds talking simultaneously. This is where young Budapestians socialise, bond, and form relationships. For a deaf or hard of hearing person, the ruin bar scene is one of the most exclusionary environments in European urban life.

Sign language not unified

  • Hungarian Sign Language is not standardised — and television carries almost no signing outside parliament
  • Hungarian Sign Language lacks standardisation, and Hungarian television channels provide sign language interpretation only for parliamentary broadcasts — not news, not entertainment, not daily programming. An estimated 60,000 deaf and hard of hearing Hungarians are blocked from accessing information in their own language in this way.

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The Challenge

60,000 deaf and hard of hearing Hungarians blocked from their own language on television. No captions at the piac, the cukrászda, or the family Sunday table.

An estimated 60,000 deaf and hard of hearing people in Hungary are obstructed from accessing information in their own language — Hungarian Sign Language — because television channels provide sign language interpretation only for parliamentary broadcasts, not for daily news, entertainment, or public information programmes. In daily life, from the Budapest piac to the village pharmacy counter, there is no captioning, no signing, and no formal support for a deaf Hungarian navigating everyday conversation alone. Hungary recognised Hungarian Sign Language at the Constitutional level — commended by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2022 — but constitutional recognition has not translated to everyday accessibility.

The KONTAKT video-based interpretation service provides free remote sign language interpretation for formal occasions in Hungary — medical and legal appointments. But the everyday informal conversation — the cukrászda with friends, the Sunday lunch with family, the building hallway exchange, the market stall negotiation — falls entirely outside any structured provision. The gap between what the law formally recognises and what a deaf Hungarian can actually access in daily life is widest precisely in the settings that constitute the texture of everyday social belonging.

Hungarian has among the highest agglutinative complexity of any European language. Linguists studying spoken Hungarian find that suffix chains at conversational pace blur into acoustically undifferentiated streams — meaning the most common grammatical information is the hardest to recover from partial hearing or lip-reading. This structural property, combined with the fast Budapest conversational pace and the noise of social venues, creates one of the most challenging everyday acoustic environments for hard of hearing people in Central Europe. Captio AI captions Hungarian speech in real time — including fast suffix chains and colloquial Budapest speech — so the family lunch, the market, and the cukrászda conversation are no longer things you 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 cukrászda with friends — fast Budapest Hungarian around a table. Captio AI captions all of it. I sit at the table and follow the conversation now."

Erzsébet V. 🇭🇺
erzsebet.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Budapest

"Hungarian agglutination is a wall for lip-reading. Captio AI gets through it. Family Sunday lunch and the market are conversations I actually participate in now."

Gábor T. 🇭🇺
gabor.t***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Debrecen

"Pharmacy Hungarian is fast and specific. Captio AI transcribes every word the pharmacist says. I manage my medication conversations completely independently."

Katalin S. 🇭🇺
katalin.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Miskolc

"The villamos and the piac were settings I got through with a lot of guessing. Now I read what is being said. Running errands is just something I do."

Péter N. 🇭🇺
peter.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Pécs

"The cukrászda with friends — fast Budapest Hungarian around a table. Captio AI captions all of it. I sit at the table and follow the conversation now."

Erzsébet V. 🇭🇺
erzsebet.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Budapest

"Hungarian agglutination is a wall for lip-reading. Captio AI gets through it. Family Sunday lunch and the market are conversations I actually participate in now."

Gábor T. 🇭🇺
gabor.t***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Debrecen

"Pharmacy Hungarian is fast and specific. Captio AI transcribes every word the pharmacist says. I manage my medication conversations completely independently."

Katalin S. 🇭🇺
katalin.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Miskolc

"The villamos and the piac were settings I got through with a lot of guessing. Now I read what is being said. Running errands is just something I do."

Péter N. 🇭🇺
peter.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Pécs

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Hungarian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store