Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Albanian live captions and productivity tool for group settings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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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.

🍽️Family dinners

Albanian weddings (dasma) are multigenerational events that can last for days — loud, joyful, and involving dozens of family members talking at once over food, drinks, and music.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A gathering in an Albanian home under the miqesia (hospitality tradition) where guests are received with coffee, food, and hours of conversation across the dining table.

Friend catch-ups

Meeting old friends at a cafe or in a home neighbourhood, catching up over coffee or raki in a long, unhurried conversation that covers everything from family to politics.

🌍Multilingual groups

Neighbourhood or village-level community discussions where multiple people speak at once, interruption is normal, and no one controls the floor for long.

👥Community and club meetings

A Sunday family meal where grandparents, parents, and children all eat and talk together, each generation occupying its own end of the conversation.

🏠Shared living situations

Afternoon gathering in a friend's courtyard or on a shared apartment landing — the kind of impromptu social moment that happens several times a week in Albanian daily life.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Albanian
92.3%

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 to keep you in the conversation, not just in the room

Captions whoever is speaking

Captio AI follows the dominant voice at any moment — whoever is loudest in the microphone's direction. In a group conversation, this tracks the active speaker naturally.

Works through background noise

Restaurants, living rooms, parties, outdoor gatherings. Moderate background noise does not prevent accurate captions — Captio AI is built for real environments, not quiet rooms.

Place it in the centre and forget it

Put the phone on the table or in the middle of the group, microphone facing the conversation. No positioning it after every speaker change, no adjusting between voices.

Less effort, less fatigue

The cognitive load of following a group conversation by lip-reading and reconstructing speech is exhausting. Captio AI handles the following so you can direct your energy toward actually being in the conversation.

60+ languages

For multilingual families, mixed-language social groups, or gatherings where people switch between languages mid-conversation. No setup required between language changes.

No setup between conversations

Open the app and place the phone. No configuration per setting, no briefing the group, nothing to manage between conversations. It works for any group, in any situation.

Albanian

Why Albanian is hard to understand

Gheg Nasal Vowels

  • Nasalized vowels invisible on lips
  • Gheg Albanian (spoken in northern Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia) uses a full set of nasalized vowels. Nasalization is produced in the soft palate and leaves virtually no trace on the lips — making Gheg speakers' words extremely difficult to distinguish visually.

Gheg-Tosk Divide

  • Two dialects, two vowel systems, same table
  • Gheg has up to 19 vowel phonemes while Tosk has 7. At a gathering where guests come from northern Albania, Kosovo, and southern Albania, the same word appears with entirely different vowel shapes on different speakers' lips.

Tosk Rhotacism

  • N becomes R depending on who is speaking
  • Tosk Albanian replaces historical n between vowels with r — a process called rhotacism. This creates words that sound and look distinct from their Gheg equivalents, so a lip-reader tracks two different word shapes for the same meaning depending on who is talking.

Consonant Cluster Density

  • Word boundaries compress at table speed
  • Albanian tolerates high consonant cluster density (mbrёmje, shpirt) especially in Gheg. In fast casual speech, these clusters compress further and word boundaries become undetectable on lips alone.

Diaspora Code-Switching

  • Albanian-Greek or Albanian-Italian mid-sentence
  • In communities with strong diaspora ties to Greece or Italy, social gatherings code-switch mid-sentence. A deaf person tracking Albanian lip patterns is suddenly facing Greek or Italian phonology without any transition signal.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Albania: the scale of daily exclusion

Albania has a population of roughly 2.8 million people, and the GBD 2019 study's regional data indicates that over one in five people in the Western Balkans experience some form of hearing loss. Extrapolating regional rates to Albania suggests several hundred thousand individuals navigating daily life with reduced hearing — a population largely invisible in official disability statistics because Albania's disability registration system historically undercounts sensory impairments.

Albania ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2013, but implementation has been uneven. Albanian Sign Language is recognised in principle, but there are very few trained interpreters nationwide — particularly outside Tirana. Access to captioned media and real-time communication support at public events, family gatherings, and community meetings remains extremely limited. The EU accession process has created some reform momentum, but practical accessibility infrastructure has moved slowly.

Captio AI captions Albanian conversation in real time — whether a family celebration in Shkoder spoken in Gheg or a diaspora gathering in Athens mixing Albanian and Greek — so deaf and hard of hearing people can follow every voice at the table without needing an interpreter present.

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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

"Albanian weddings are three days of noise, music, and overlapping conversation. I have never been able to follow them — until Captio AI. I could finally read the toasts and jokes in real time."

Arta K. 🇦🇱
arta.k***@gmail.com
Tirana, severe bilateral hearing loss

"Gheg Albanian from Kosovo has nasal vowels, longer vowels, different stress. No other tool handled it well. Captio AI captures my family's speech accurately."

Besnik M. 🇽🇰
besnik.m***@gmail.com
Pristina, Kosovo, hard of hearing since adolescence

"In Athens my family switches between Albanian and Greek constantly. With Captio AI I can follow the Albanian parts of the conversation — which was impossible before."

Floria S. 🇬🇷
floria.s***@gmail.com
Athens, Albanian diaspora, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"My family speaks a mix of Macedonian and Albanian — mostly Gheg with Macedonian words mixed in. Captio AI handles the Albanian speech well even in noisy home settings."

Armend L. 🇲🇰
armend.l***@gmail.com
Skopje, North Macedonia, deaf since birth

"Albanian weddings are three days of noise, music, and overlapping conversation. I have never been able to follow them — until Captio AI. I could finally read the toasts and jokes in real time."

Arta K. 🇦🇱
arta.k***@gmail.com
Tirana, severe bilateral hearing loss

"Gheg Albanian from Kosovo has nasal vowels, longer vowels, different stress. No other tool handled it well. Captio AI captures my family's speech accurately."

Besnik M. 🇽🇰
besnik.m***@gmail.com
Pristina, Kosovo, hard of hearing since adolescence

"In Athens my family switches between Albanian and Greek constantly. With Captio AI I can follow the Albanian parts of the conversation — which was impossible before."

Floria S. 🇬🇷
floria.s***@gmail.com
Athens, Albanian diaspora, moderate sensorineural hearing loss

"My family speaks a mix of Macedonian and Albanian — mostly Gheg with Macedonian words mixed in. Captio AI handles the Albanian speech well even in noisy home settings."

Armend L. 🇲🇰
armend.l***@gmail.com
Skopje, North Macedonia, deaf since birth

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Albanian.

Captio AI is free to start

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