Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hungarian 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🍽️Family dinners

A Hungarian family dinner — a karácsony celebration, a name day, or a Sunday family lunch — with multiple relatives talking across the table in Hungarian.

🎉Social gatherings and parties

A birthday party or backyard garden gathering where friends and family catch up freely and several conversations run simultaneously.

Friend catch-ups

A catch-up with old friends over pálinka and gulyás, with rapid conversation moving between personal news, family updates, and current events.

🌍Multilingual groups

A community meeting at a local cultural association, church, or neighbourhood committee where announcements are made and everyone responds.

👥Community and club meetings

Three generations at a family table — grandparents in regional Hungarian dialect, parents in standard Hungarian, grandchildren mixing in English or German.

🏠Shared living situations

A casual evening at a Hungarian csárda, a neighbourhood pub, or a friend's home where small groups form and talk freely.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hungarian
94.4%

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.

Hungarian

Why Hungarian is hard to understand

Vowel length — 14 phonemes

  • Short and long vowels change meaning with no visible difference
  • Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes, each paired by duration: /a/-/aː/, /e/-/eː/, /i/-/iː/, /o/-/oː/, /u/-/uː/, /ø/-/øː/, /y/-/yː/. Length is phonemically contrastive — it changes word meaning — but produces no change in lip rounding or jaw position. At a family dinner, short and long vowels look identical across the table.

Palatal consonants

  • Hungarian's unique /gy/, /ty/, /ny/, /ly/ are invisible on lips
  • Hungarian has palatal stop and nasal consonants — /ɟ/ (gy), /c/ (ty), /ɲ/ (ny), and historically /ʎ/ (ly) — that do not exist in neighbouring languages. These are produced by contact between the tongue body and the hard palate, creating no distinctive visible lip movement. A deaf person has no visual cue to distinguish these from related non-palatal consonants.

Agglutinative suffix chains

  • Grammatical meaning stacks at the end of long words
  • Hungarian is agglutinative: multiple suffixes pile onto a stem, each carrying case, possession, plurality, and tense information. In fast family conversation, words with five or six stacked suffixes appear frequently, and the suffix sequence moves too quickly and too far back in the mouth to read on the lips.

Regional dialect variation

  • Eastern, Western, and Southern Hungarian sound different
  • Hungarian dialects — Northeastern, Western (Transdanubian), Southern, and Central — differ in vowel quality, diphthong realization, and some consonant features. A deaf person from Budapest lip-reading relatives from Debrecen, Pécs, or a Hungarian community in Slovakia or Romania at the same gathering encounters recognizably different phonological patterns.

Vowel harmony

  • Suffix vowels harmonize to word stems — adding more ambiguous vowels
  • Like Turkish and Azerbaijani, Hungarian has vowel harmony: suffixes must harmonize front-back with the word stem. This means every grammatical suffix changes its vowel depending on the stem, producing a stream of harmonically patterned vowels that look even more similar on the lips than they already do.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Hungary: the scale of daily exclusion

Hungary is home to one of Europe's oldest deaf advocacy organisations: the Hungarian Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SINOSZ), founded in 1907, which has spent more than a century working to improve education, social integration, and communication access for deaf and hard-of-hearing Hungarians. Hungarian Sign Language (Magyar Jelnyelv) received formal legal recognition in 2009 under the Hungarian Sign Language Act — making Hungary one of the Central European countries to codify sign language rights. The Global Burden of Disease 2019 study found that hearing loss is the most prevalent cause of years lived with disability in Europe, affecting tens of millions across the continent, with prevalence increasing substantially with age.

Despite SINOSZ's century of advocacy and the legal recognition of Hungarian Sign Language, access to real-time communication support in informal and community settings in Hungary remains very limited. Sign language interpretation is available for formal public contexts but is effectively absent from family social gatherings, birthday celebrations, community meetings, and neighbourhood events — the settings where Hungarian deaf and hard-of-hearing adults most frequently report feeling excluded from conversation. Hungarian's phonological complexity — 14 vowel phonemes distinguished by length, unique palatal consonants, and agglutinative suffix chains — makes lip-reading in group settings particularly demanding even for experienced lip-readers.

Captio AI captions Hungarian conversation in real time on a phone screen — so a deaf family member at a karácsony dinner or a multigenerational gathering in Budapest, Debrecen, or a Hungarian diaspora event in Vienna or Toronto can follow every story, toast, and debate as it is spoken.

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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 karácsony dinner everyone talks at once and the conversation moves fast. Captio AI followed the whole table — I finally caught the stories my nagymama was telling."

Éva K. 🇭🇺
eva.k***@gmail.com
Budapest, moderate bilateral loss since childhood

"Eastern Hungarian sounds quite different from Budapest Hungarian. The app handled my family's regional speech at a name day gathering — I didn't miss a single toast."

Gábor S. 🇭🇺
gabor.s***@gmail.com
Debrecen, severe high-frequency loss

"At Hungarian community events here the conversation is fast and overlapping. Captio AI kept up with everything — I felt included instead of watching from the side."

Krisztina V. 🇦🇹
krisztina.v***@gmail.com
Vienna, profound loss, Hungarian diaspora

"At family gatherings we mix Hungarian and sometimes Romanian. Captio AI followed the Hungarian conversation accurately — I stayed part of the evening instead of catching fragments."

Péter B. 🇷🇴
peter.b***@gmail.com
Cluj-Napoca, moderate loss, ethnic Hungarian in Romania

"At our karácsony dinner everyone talks at once and the conversation moves fast. Captio AI followed the whole table — I finally caught the stories my nagymama was telling."

Éva K. 🇭🇺
eva.k***@gmail.com
Budapest, moderate bilateral loss since childhood

"Eastern Hungarian sounds quite different from Budapest Hungarian. The app handled my family's regional speech at a name day gathering — I didn't miss a single toast."

Gábor S. 🇭🇺
gabor.s***@gmail.com
Debrecen, severe high-frequency loss

"At Hungarian community events here the conversation is fast and overlapping. Captio AI kept up with everything — I felt included instead of watching from the side."

Krisztina V. 🇦🇹
krisztina.v***@gmail.com
Vienna, profound loss, Hungarian diaspora

"At family gatherings we mix Hungarian and sometimes Romanian. Captio AI followed the Hungarian conversation accurately — I stayed part of the evening instead of catching fragments."

Péter B. 🇷🇴
peter.b***@gmail.com
Cluj-Napoca, moderate loss, ethnic Hungarian in Romania

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Keep up with the group in Hungarian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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