Bulgarian live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

The Union of the Deaf in Bulgaria counts over 6,500 members and supports 13 commercial companies focused on self-employment initiatives for deaf Bulgarians — an indicator of how structurally excluded deaf people have been from mainstream employment. Bulgaria has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and has disability employment legislation providing for quotas and reasonable accommodation. The EU Disability Forum has found that across Europe, the majority of persons with disabilities remain locked out of quality employment — Bulgaria is no exception, with disability employment rates below EU averages.

Bulgaria's economy has undergone significant transformation since EU accession, with a growing IT and outsourcing sector, a manufacturing base, and traditional sectors including agriculture and tourism. The interview formats at major Sofia employers — banks, tech companies, state enterprises, and multinationals — are structured verbal processes without standard captioning. EU social protection documentation for Bulgaria notes reliance on disability benefits rather than employment as a persistent pattern, suggesting barriers to employment entry that the interview stage reflects.

Bulgarian's linguistic structure creates a specific phonological challenge. Vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, similar to Russian, leaves large portions of words visually compressed. Formal corporate vocabulary differs from everyday speech. And Sofia's tech sector creates code-switching interviews requiring simultaneous tracking of Bulgarian and English. Captio AI requires no employer arrangement: open the app at the start of the събеседване, place the phone on the desk, and every Bulgarian sentence — unstressed vowels resolved from audio — is available in real time.