Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Romanian 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

Farmacie counter, poștă window, supermarket checkout, bancă teller. Staff speak fast in Romanian and move to the next person. Captio AI shows what they said before the moment passes.

🍽️Group conversations

Sunday family lunch, birthday dinner, neighbours gathering in the curte. Multiple generations, fast overlapping Romanian, regional accents mixing. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

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

Informal work moments

Pauza de cafea conversation, a quick question in the coridor, catch-up before a meeting. The moments Romanian workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Cabinet medical reception, primărie counter, ANAF office, bank branch. Formal vocabulary, fast delivery, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Romanian
95.6%

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.

Romanian

Why Romanian is hard to understand

Dense consonant clusters

  • Romanian clusters like str-, -mpt, and -nct produce near-identical lip shapes
  • Romanian has among the densest consonant clusters in European languages — words like construcție, rupt, and complex begin or end with consonant combinations that produce almost no distinguishable lip movement. For a deaf lip-reader, these clusters are visually identical to each other, making the first or last syllable — where critical meaning often sits — impossible to distinguish.

Fast urban Bucharest speech

  • Everyday Bucharest Romanian is spoken at a rapid pace with reduced vowels
  • Bucharest and major Romanian cities have developed a fast colloquial spoken register that bears little resemblance to formal written Romanian. Vowels are reduced, endings blur, and informal vocabulary is heavy. A deaf person who has learned to lip-read formal Romanian finds everyday urban conversation an entirely different challenge.

Regional dialect shifts

  • Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia each have distinct pronunciations
  • Romanian spoken in Transylvania sounds different from Moldavian Romanian and from Wallachian Romanian. A deaf person who has calibrated their lip-reading in Bucharest may struggle significantly when visiting family in Transylvania or Moldavia. Three major dialect zones mean three distinct lip-reading challenges.

Late hearing diagnosis

  • Most Romanian hospitals do not screen newborns for hearing loss — diagnosis comes years late
  • Romania is among the European countries where neonatal hearing screening is not routine practice. Most sensorineural hearing loss in Romanian children is diagnosed after the age of three, meaning years of language acquisition happen without appropriate support. Early detection interventions that are standard in Western Europe are largely absent.

No social awareness of deaf communication

  • Most Romanians have no experience communicating with deaf people and show little patience
  • Despite Law 27/2020 recognising Romanian Sign Language, public awareness of deaf communication needs remains very low. At market stalls, pharmacies, and transport stops, deaf Romanians report that hearing people show visible impatience when asked to repeat, write, or slow down — creating a social barrier on top of the acoustic one.

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The Challenge

350,000 deaf and hard of hearing Romanians. Officially registered: 21,879. No captions at the piața, the farmacii, or the bloc courtyard.

Gallaudet University estimates Romania's deaf and hard of hearing population at 350,000 — yet the Romanian Ministry of Labour's official registry records only 21,879 persons with hearing disability. This 16-fold gap reflects not statistical error but systematic underdiagnosis: Romania lacks routine neonatal hearing screening, meaning most sensorineural hearing loss in children is diagnosed after the age of three, according to a 2020 PMC study of congenital hearing loss in the Romanian population. For deaf and hard of hearing Romanians, daily life plays out at the piața vendor counter, the farmacii, the tramvai stop, and the family Sunday table — settings with no captioning, no interpretation, and no pause for those who cannot hear.

Romania legally recognised Romanian Sign Language (Limbajul Semnelor Românesc / LSR) in 2020 through Law 27/2020. But a 2025 report described LSR as a bridge that exists in law and not yet in daily infrastructure. Inclusion of persons with disabilities is not yet a reality in Romania, with serious deficits in accessibility in everyday life documented by disability rights organisations. The gap between legal recognition and practical accessibility is widest in informal settings — the market, the pharmacy, the bloc courtyard — where no law requires an interpreter and no employer provides one.

A 2015 SIL International sociolinguistic survey of Romania's deaf community found three distinct regional LSR varieties — Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia — reflecting the broader pattern of regional dialect variation in spoken Romanian. Many deaf Romanians, particularly outside Bucharest and Cluj, remain isolated from broader hearing society. The Romanian government's undercount of 21,879 registered persons means most of the 350,000 estimated deaf and hard of hearing Romanians are invisible to policy, service, and support systems. Captio AI captions Romanian speech in real time — including regional dialect variation and fast urban Bucharest speech — so the piața, the family meal, and the neighbourhood conversation are no longer settings you have to navigate alone.

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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

"Bucharest Romanian is fast and the pharmacist never slows down. Captio AI transcribes everything instantly. I handle the farmacii alone now without anxiety."

Ioana P. 🇷🇴
ioana.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bucharest

"Transylvanian Romanian sounds different from Bucharest speech. Captio AI handles both. Family trips to relatives in different regions are conversations I actually follow."

Mihai D. 🇷🇴
mihai.d***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Cluj-Napoca

"The piața in Iași is loud and Moldavian Romanian is fast. Captio AI keeps up with every vendor. I do my shopping completely independently now."

Elena C. 🇷🇴
elena.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Iași

"Bloc courtyard conversations with neighbours were always something I nodded through. Now I read them in real time. The neighbourhood is a place I actually belong in."

Andrei T. 🇷🇴
andrei.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Brașov

"Bucharest Romanian is fast and the pharmacist never slows down. Captio AI transcribes everything instantly. I handle the farmacii alone now without anxiety."

Ioana P. 🇷🇴
ioana.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bucharest

"Transylvanian Romanian sounds different from Bucharest speech. Captio AI handles both. Family trips to relatives in different regions are conversations I actually follow."

Mihai D. 🇷🇴
mihai.d***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Cluj-Napoca

"The piața in Iași is loud and Moldavian Romanian is fast. Captio AI keeps up with every vendor. I do my shopping completely independently now."

Elena C. 🇷🇴
elena.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Iași

"Bloc courtyard conversations with neighbours were always something I nodded through. Now I read them in real time. The neighbourhood is a place I actually belong in."

Andrei T. 🇷🇴
andrei.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Brașov

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Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Romanian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store