Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Croatian live captions and productivity tool for group settings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🍽️Family dinners

Croatian family celebrations — a patron saint feast, a wedding, or a birthday — are long, joyful events with food, drink, and everyone talking at once around a loaded table.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

An evening with friends in a Croatian konoba (traditional tavern) or at someone's home, with wine, cheese, and prsut, where conversation runs well into the night.

Friend catch-ups

Meeting old friends in a cafe on the Dalmatian coast or in Zagreb, catching up over coffee in an unhurried, flowing conversation about family and life.

🌍Multilingual groups

A neighbourhood or homeowners meeting where several people speak at once, debate local issues, and no single person controls the floor for long.

👥Community and club meetings

A Sunday family meal where grandparents, parents, and children all eat together — grandparents speaking Dalmatian dialect, parents in standard Croatian, children with a Zagreb accent.

🏠Shared living situations

A summer evening gathering on a Croatian terrace or by the sea — the kind of relaxed social moment where neighbours and friends come together without formality.

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 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.

Croatian

Why Croatian is hard to understand

Pitch Accent System

  • Four tones, zero lip trace
  • Croatian has a four-way tonal accent system — short rising, short falling, long rising, long falling. These distinctions change word meaning but leave zero visible trace on the lips. Two words with different accents look identical on a speaker's face.

Three-Dialect Divide

  • Three dialects as different as three languages
  • Croatian's three major dialect groups — Stokavian (the standard), Cakavian (the coast and islands), and Kajkavian (Zagreb and northwest Croatia) — differ substantially in phonology, vocabulary, and prosody. A gathering with family from Dalmatia, the Zagorje, and Zagreb is linguistically equivalent to guests from three different countries.

Yat Reflex Variation

  • Same word, three different vowel shapes
  • The historical vowel yat is realised differently across Croatian dialects: as ije in standard Stokavian (bijelo), as i in Ikavian Cakavian (bilo), and as e in some Kajkavian areas (belo). Three speakers saying the same word produce three different vowel shapes on their lips.

Dalmatian Vowel Reduction

  • Coastal speech at maximum speed
  • Coastal Dalmatian speech is notably fast with strong reduction of unstressed vowels. Words that should be two syllables compress to one. What reaches the ear at normal conversation speed produces minimal visual information across multiple speakers at a table.

Diaspora Code-Switching

  • Croatian-German mid-sentence in diaspora settings
  • In diaspora communities in Germany, Austria, and Australia, social gatherings regularly code-switch between Croatian and the country's language. A deaf person tracking Croatian lip patterns is suddenly faced with German or English phonology mid-sentence.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Croatia: the scale of daily exclusion

According to the Croatian Registry of Persons with Disabilities, 13,609 people have a disability caused by hearing loss — just 0.32 percent of Croatia's 3.9 million people. However, research on deaf education in Croatia has documented that this figure represents approximately one-sixteenth of the international prevalence rate, suggesting the true number of people with meaningful hearing loss is closer to 200,000. The undercount reflects both registration barriers and the tendency of older Croatians with progressive hearing loss to not formally identify as disabled.

The Croatian Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing was established in 1921 — one of the oldest in the region — and today counts approximately 9,000 members across 23 local organisations. Yet practical communication support remains limited. Only about 20 qualified sign language interpreters are working in Croatia, with three in Zagreb. The Croatian Sign Language Act has been drafted but as of the time of writing had not been forwarded to the parliamentary adoption procedure, leaving Croatian Sign Language without the legal recognition that would trigger investment in accessible communication infrastructure.

Captio AI captions Croatian conversation in real time — whether Stokavian at a Zagreb dinner table or fast Dalmatian coastal dialect at a summer gathering — so deaf and hard of hearing Croatians can read every voice in the room, not guess at what was said.

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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

"Dalmatian family gatherings are loud and fast — wine, food, and everyone shouting across the table. Captio AI gave me my family's conversation back, including the jokes I always pretended to laugh at."

Maja V. 🇭🇷
maja.v***@gmail.com
Split, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"My family has members from Zagreb, the coast, and the Zagorje — three different dialects around one table. Captio AI handled them all without me having to switch anything."

Ivan K. 🇭🇷
ivan.k***@gmail.com
Zagreb, hard of hearing since childhood

"Croatian pitch accents make words sound different but look completely identical on lips. Captio AI catches the sound, not the lips, so it gets the right word every time."

Marija H. 🇭🇷
marija.h***@gmail.com
Dubrovnik, severe sensorineural hearing loss

"In our diaspora group here we speak Croatian with German words mixed in constantly. Captio AI follows the Croatian parts clearly and that is already a huge improvement for me."

Tomislav R. 🇩🇪
tomislav.r***@gmail.com
Munich, Croatian diaspora, progressive hearing loss

"Dalmatian family gatherings are loud and fast — wine, food, and everyone shouting across the table. Captio AI gave me my family's conversation back, including the jokes I always pretended to laugh at."

Maja V. 🇭🇷
maja.v***@gmail.com
Split, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"My family has members from Zagreb, the coast, and the Zagorje — three different dialects around one table. Captio AI handled them all without me having to switch anything."

Ivan K. 🇭🇷
ivan.k***@gmail.com
Zagreb, hard of hearing since childhood

"Croatian pitch accents make words sound different but look completely identical on lips. Captio AI catches the sound, not the lips, so it gets the right word every time."

Marija H. 🇭🇷
marija.h***@gmail.com
Dubrovnik, severe sensorineural hearing loss

"In our diaspora group here we speak Croatian with German words mixed in constantly. Captio AI follows the Croatian parts clearly and that is already a huge improvement for me."

Tomislav R. 🇩🇪
tomislav.r***@gmail.com
Munich, Croatian diaspora, progressive hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Croatian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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