Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Slovak 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

Lekáreň counter, pošta window, supermarket checkout, úrad desk. Staff speak fast in Slovak and move on. Captio AI shows what they said before the moment passes.

🍽️Group conversations

Sunday family obed, birthday celebration, neighbours gathering. Multiple generations, fast Slovak, Bratislava versus eastern regional accents mixing. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

👋Talking to strangers

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

Informal work moments

Prestávka na kávu conversation, a quick question in the chodbe, catch-up before a meeting. The moments Slovak workplaces run on. Captio AI keeps you in those conversations.

📋Appointments and admin

Obvodný lekár reception, úrad counter, bank branch, sociálna poisťovňa office. Formal vocabulary, fast delivery, no repeat expected. Captio AI transcribes everything said.

🚉Getting around

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

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

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.

Slovak

Why Slovak is hard to understand

Vowel length distinctions

  • Slovak uses vowel length to distinguish meaning — the same structural problem as Finnish, but in a Slavic context
  • Slovak, like Finnish and Czech, uses vowel length to distinguish word pairs. 'Pas' (belt) vs 'pás' (waist/band), 'mat' (to have) vs 'mát' (to wave). These distinctions are purely acoustic. On the lips, the short and long versions look identical. A lip-reader misses vowel length systematically — losing a significant portion of lexical distinctions in every conversation.

Consonant clusters

  • Slovak has dense consonant clusters, including syllabic r and l, that are nearly invisible on the lips
  • Slovak has syllabic consonants — r and l can form the nucleus of a syllable with no vowel at all (e.g., 'prst' — finger, 'vlk' — wolf). These vowelless words and phrases produce extended consonant sequences with almost no useful lip movement for a reader. Like Czech, Slovak can produce near-vowelless phrases in ordinary conversation.

Hungarian code-switching in south

  • In southern Slovakia, everyday conversations frequently switch between Slovak and Hungarian
  • Slovakia's southern regions — bordering Hungary — have large Hungarian-speaking communities. Everyday conversation in towns like Komárno, Nové Zámky, and Dunajská Streda frequently mixes Slovak and Hungarian. For a deaf Slovak lip-reader, this code-switching between two completely different language families creates an unpredictable and very demanding lip-reading target.

Fast Bratislava colloquial

  • Bratislava everyday speech is fast and colloquial, mixing Slovak with Czech and English
  • Bratislava's cosmopolitan urban environment produces fast colloquial speech that freely mixes Slovak with Czech loanwords and English vocabulary — especially among younger speakers. This informal register diverges substantially from formal written Slovak, creating a gap that a deaf lip-reader trained on formal Slovak will experience as an almost separate target.

Limited rural interpreter access

  • Slovak Sign Language interpreters are concentrated in Bratislava — in rural Slovakia there is almost no formal support
  • Slovak Sign Language is legally recognised but interpreter availability is heavily concentrated in Bratislava and larger cities. In rural central and eastern Slovakia — regions with distinct dialects and significant Roma communities — deaf people have practically no access to formal sign language support in any everyday setting.

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The Challenge

Over 500,000 Slovaks with hearing loss. Sign language recognised but interpreters concentrated in Bratislava. No captions at the krčma, the trhovisko, or the family Sunday table.

Approximately 500,000 people in Slovakia — roughly 9% of the population — live with some degree of hearing loss, according to EuroTrak Slovakia data. Of these, around 7,000 use Slovak Sign Language. For deaf and hard of hearing Slovaks, everyday life involves the krčma, the outdoor market, the bus, and the family meal — settings built entirely on oral exchange with no captioning or sign language infrastructure. Slovak Sign Language is legally recognised, but certified interpreters are heavily concentrated in Bratislava: in rural central and eastern Slovakia, formal interpretation support in any everyday setting is effectively absent.

Southern Slovakia presents a specific additional challenge: large Hungarian-speaking communities in the region produce daily conversations that switch between Slovak and Hungarian. In towns along the Slovak-Hungarian border, a deaf Slovak may need to follow code-switching between two completely different language families — Slavic Slovak and Finno-Ugric Hungarian — in the same conversation. A krčma in Komárno or a market in Nové Zámky may involve both languages in a single exchange.

Slovak presents structural lip-reading challenges beyond dialect variation: vowel length distinctions that carry lexical meaning, and consonant clusters with syllabic r and l that produce near-vowelless sequences. These are properties of everyday common Slovak vocabulary — not rare linguistic phenomena. Combined with the fast pace of Bratislava colloquial speech and the rural isolation from support services, deaf Slovaks face a daily communication gap that formal infrastructure cannot close. Captio AI captions Slovak speech in real time — including fast Bratislava colloquial, Slovak-Hungarian code-switching, and regional eastern Slovak varieties — so the market, the pub, and the family Sunday lunch are no longer conversations 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 kaviareň with friends — fast Bratislava Slovak mixed with Czech and English. Captio AI handles all of it. I follow the whole conversation now."

Katarína V. 🇸🇰
katarina.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bratislava

"Košice Slovak sounds different from Bratislava. Captio AI handles both. The trhovisko and the bus are things I do completely alone now."

Marek H. 🇸🇰
marek.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Košice

"In Komárno everything switches between Slovak and Hungarian. Captio AI follows both. I navigate conversations at the market and with neighbours without guessing."

Zuzana T. 🇸🇰
zuzana.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Komárno

"Family Sunday lunch in north Slovak dialect is its own challenge. Captio AI captions it. The family table is a conversation I actually participate in now."

Peter N. 🇸🇰
peter.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Žilina

"The kaviareň with friends — fast Bratislava Slovak mixed with Czech and English. Captio AI handles all of it. I follow the whole conversation now."

Katarína V. 🇸🇰
katarina.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bratislava

"Košice Slovak sounds different from Bratislava. Captio AI handles both. The trhovisko and the bus are things I do completely alone now."

Marek H. 🇸🇰
marek.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Košice

"In Komárno everything switches between Slovak and Hungarian. Captio AI follows both. I navigate conversations at the market and with neighbours without guessing."

Zuzana T. 🇸🇰
zuzana.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Komárno

"Family Sunday lunch in north Slovak dialect is its own challenge. Captio AI captions it. The family table is a conversation I actually participate in now."

Peter N. 🇸🇰
peter.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Žilina

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow any conversation in Slovak.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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