Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Czech 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

A Czech family dinner — a Christmas Eve večeře, a svatomartinský celebration, or a Sunday family lunch — with multiple relatives talking across the table.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A birthday party or garden gathering where friends and family catch up freely and small groups form and reform.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends over svíčková and pivo, with rapid conversation ranging across personal news and shared memories.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community gathering at a local cultural club, parish hall, or residents' association where announcements are made and everyone responds.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a family table — grandparents in regional Moravian or Silesian Czech, parents in standard Czech, grandchildren mixing in English or German.

🏠Shared living situations

A casual evening at a Czech pub or a friend's home where small groups talk freely over drinks.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Czech
90.3%

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.

Czech

Why Czech is hard to understand

The ř sound

  • A phoneme that exists in no other language — and is invisible on lips
  • Czech has /ř/, a simultaneous trill-fricative combination that does not exist in any other major language. It is produced through complex tongue dynamics that leave no visible signature on the lips. For a deaf person lip-reading at a family gathering, words containing /ř/ — including some of the most common Czech words — produce no distinguishable visual information.

Consonant clusters

  • Vowel-free words create unresolvable visual compression
  • Czech permits dense consonant clusters — including entire syllabic words with no vowel at all, such as strč (push) or čtvrtém (fourth-locative). These sequences produce rapid tongue movements with minimal lip change. At social conversation pace, cluster-heavy Czech words compress into a single brief visual event.

Bohemian-Moravian dialect gap

  • Prague and Brno Czech sound different
  • Bohemian Czech (Prague standard) and Moravian Czech differ in vowel quality, diphthong realization, and some consonant features. Silesian Czech is different enough to be treated as a regional variety. A deaf person from Prague lip-reading Brno or Ostrava relatives at the same family gathering encounters genuinely different phonological patterns.

Vowel length distinction

  • Short and long vowels change meaning — same lip shape
  • Czech has phonemic vowel length: short /a/ and long /aː/ are different words, as are /e/-/eː/, /i/-/iː/, and /u/-/uː/. This distinction is produced entirely in timing, with no change in lip or jaw position. At a dinner table, short and long vowels look identical, making dozens of minimal pairs visually indistinguishable.

Final devoicing

  • Word-final minimal pairs sound and look the same
  • Czech systematically devoices word-final obstruents. Words that differ only in their final voiced vs voiceless consonant — had (snake) / hat (snake-vocative); hrad (castle) / hrat (to play) — are pronounced identically in natural speech. At a gathering, these minimal pairs add a layer of ambiguity on top of the existing /ř/ and vowel-length challenges.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in the Czech Republic: the scale of daily exclusion

An estimated 300,000 people in the Czech Republic have some degree of hearing impairment — approaching 3% of the national population of 10.7 million. Research on the genetic aetiology of non-syndromic hearing loss in the Moravia-Silesia region has documented the prevalence and distribution of causative mutations, including GJB2 variants, which account for a significant proportion of congenital hearing loss cases in the Czech population. The Czech Republic ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009 and legally recognised Czech Sign Language as an official language under the Sign Language Act of 1998 — one of the earlier formal sign language recognition laws in Central Europe.

Despite legal recognition, access to sign language interpretation in informal and community settings in the Czech Republic is limited. Deaf associations and clubs play a central role in the social lives of Czech deaf adults — providing advocacy, networking, and community belonging — but family social events, birthday gatherings, and neighbourhood meetings receive no communication support. The Telefónica Hearing-Impaired Line offers telephony support, but real-time group conversation captioning at social gatherings remains unavailable through any public or voluntary service. Czech is phonologically among the most complex languages in Europe for lip-readers: its unique /ř/ phoneme, dense consonant clusters, and three-way sibilant distinctions create barriers that no lip-reading training reliably overcomes in group settings.

Captio AI captions Czech conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at a Christmas Eve dinner or a birthday gathering in Prague, Brno, or Ostrava can follow every story, toast, and debate as it is spoken, without sitting apart from the table.

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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

"At our Christmas Eve dinner everyone talks at once and the ř sounds make lip-reading impossible. Captio AI followed everything — I finally caught all the family stories."

Markéta H. 🇨🇿
marketa.h***@gmail.com
Praha, moderate bilateral loss since childhood

"My Prague relatives and my Moravian family sound very different. The app handled both at the same birthday gathering — I stopped missing jokes that made everyone else laugh."

Tomáš V. 🇨🇿
tomas.v***@gmail.com
Brno, severe high-frequency loss

"Czech community events here are loud and conversation moves fast. Captio AI kept up with the conversation — I felt part of the gathering instead of watching from the side."

Jana N. 🇩🇪
jana.n***@gmail.com
Berlin, profound loss, Czech diaspora

"Silesian Czech with all the dialect features is hard to lip-read. Captio AI captured my family's speech accurately at a family dinner — I finally stayed in the conversation the whole evening."

Lukáš P. 🇨🇿
lukas.p***@gmail.com
Ostrava, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

"At our Christmas Eve dinner everyone talks at once and the ř sounds make lip-reading impossible. Captio AI followed everything — I finally caught all the family stories."

Markéta H. 🇨🇿
marketa.h***@gmail.com
Praha, moderate bilateral loss since childhood

"My Prague relatives and my Moravian family sound very different. The app handled both at the same birthday gathering — I stopped missing jokes that made everyone else laugh."

Tomáš V. 🇨🇿
tomas.v***@gmail.com
Brno, severe high-frequency loss

"Czech community events here are loud and conversation moves fast. Captio AI kept up with the conversation — I felt part of the gathering instead of watching from the side."

Jana N. 🇩🇪
jana.n***@gmail.com
Berlin, profound loss, Czech diaspora

"Silesian Czech with all the dialect features is hard to lip-read. Captio AI captured my family's speech accurately at a family dinner — I finally stayed in the conversation the whole evening."

Lukáš P. 🇨🇿
lukas.p***@gmail.com
Ostrava, moderate loss, wears hearing aids

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Czech.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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