Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Albanian live captions and productivity tool for lectures

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.

🏛️Large lecture halls

Large lecture halls at the University of Tirana, University of Prishtina (Kosovo), and South East European University — Albanian instruction at full academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and tutorial sessions where discussion is in Albanian, often with English scientific or legal vocabulary. Captio AI handles both without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university portals or shared as video files — play on speaker and Captio AI captions whatever is playing in real time.

📚Study groups

Study group sessions in Albanian student accommodation reviewing lecture content. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Lectures from Kosovo or North Macedonian faculty whose Albanian carries Geg phonological features. Captio AI handles standard Tosk and Geg Albanian varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Online courses and webinars delivered by Albanian universities. Captio AI captions any audio source in real time.

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 for the pace and pressure of a real lecture

Follow without splitting your attention

Lip-reading and note-taking at the same time is an impossible cognitive load. Captio AI handles the following so you can direct all your attention to understanding what is being said.

Captions while the lecturer is still speaking

Words appear on your screen as they are said — not after the sentence ends. You stay in sync with the lecture rather than always being a beat behind.

Works in any lecture setting

Lecture halls, seminar rooms, online classes, study groups. Place the phone on your desk, point it toward the audio source, and Captio AI handles the rest.

A full transcript to study from

Record the lecture and upload it to Audio Transcription after class. Get a complete written record you can search, annotate, and revise from — at your own pace.

60+ languages

For international students, students studying abroad, or courses taught in a second language. Captio AI captions or translates in real time with no manual setup.

No advance notice needed

Official university captioning requires booking in advance and is not available for every session. Captio AI works for any lecture, any time, with no prior arrangement.

Albanian

Why Albanian is hard to understand

Tosk-Geg dialect split

  • Standard Albanian and northern Geg Albanian produce different word shapes for the same content
  • Albanian has two major dialect groups: Tosk (south, basis of standard Albanian) and Geg (north, Kosovo, North Macedonia). Tosk is characterised by rhotacism of 'n' between vowels — producing /r/ where Geg keeps /n/. Geg preserves nasalized vowels and different vowel qualities. In a Tirana university, a lecturer from Kosovo or northern Albania delivers word shapes that differ substantially from standard Tosk.

Dental fricatives

  • Albanian has both /θ/ and /ð/ — both difficult to distinguish from stops on the lips
  • Albanian is unusual among European languages in having both dental fricatives — the same 'th' sounds as English 'thin' and 'this'. These are produced with the tongue at or between the teeth. In fast academic speech they reduce toward dental contact, looking very similar to dental stops /t/ and /d/ on the lips. A deaf student tracking Albanian phonemes at lecture speed loses the fricative-stop distinction.

Central schwa vowel

  • Albanian ë is a near-invisible central vowel — the most common vowel in the word-final position
  • Standard Albanian has a central schwa-like vowel written as ë. It appears frequently in word-final and unstressed positions. Produced with the lips near-neutral, it generates minimal visible lip movement. In a lecture hall, Albanian words ending in ë — the majority of Albanian nouns in their indefinite form — arrive with a near-invisible final articulation.

Albanian-English mixing

  • Albanian university lectures mix Albanian and English academic vocabulary mid-sentence
  • Albanian higher education, particularly in Kosovo, has a strong English-medium influence. Lectures in Albanian shift to English for technical vocabulary, references, and often entire explanations. For a deaf student, the shift between Albanian phonology and English phonology happens without visual warning, requiring constant recalibration.

Nasalized vowels in Geg

  • Geg Albanian nasalizes vowels — with no visual difference from oral vowels on the lips
  • Geg Albanian retains nasalized vowels that are phonemically distinct from oral vowels. Nasalization is an acoustic feature with no visual correlate on the lips. For a deaf student at a Kosovo or North Macedonian university, Geg Albanian faculty produce nasalized vowels that look identical to oral vowels from the front.

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The Challenge

Deaf unemployment three times higher than hearing peers — in a country where sign language was slow to be legislated

A 2015 national survey of deaf people in Albania, commissioned by the Ministry of Social Welfare and Youth in collaboration with the Albanian National Association of the Deaf (ANAD) and the Finnish Association of the Deaf, found that the unemployment rate of deaf Albanian adults is three times higher than among the hearing population. The survey was the first systematic study of deaf Albanians' access to daily life — human interaction, information, education, and employment — conducted in light of Albania's ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2013.

The survey documented that deaf Albanians face significant barriers to education, with many reporting limited access to sign language instruction and interpreter services in formal educational settings. Albanian Sign Language has historically lacked the statutory recognition and institutional support provided to sign languages in most of Western Europe. Universities in Albania — and the University of Prishtina in Kosovo — do not provide systematic live captioning, and deaf students must individually negotiate whatever support exists.

The situation is compounded by Albania's linguistic diversity: standard Albanian is Tosk-based, but a significant portion of the Albanian-speaking population in Kosovo and North Macedonia speaks Geg, which has different phonological features. A deaf student who successfully lip-reads Tosk Albanian finds Geg faculty at a Kosovo university presenting word shapes from a different phonological system. Captio AI captions Albanian lecture speech in real time — in Tirana, Prishtina, or Tetovo — handling Tosk and Geg varieties so every Albanian university lecture is accessible.

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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 words ending in ë have almost no lip movement at the end. I was reading up to the last syllable and then guessing the word. Captio AI captures the full word. Tirana lectures make sense now."

Arta M. 🇦🇱
arta.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Tirana

"My professors speak Geg. The nasalized vowels and different rhotics look nothing like the Tosk standard I learned. Captio AI handles both varieties. Prishtina lectures are accessible."

Besnik G. 🇽🇰
besnik.g***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Prishtina, Kosovo

"Technical lectures switch between Albanian and English constantly. Two phonological systems in the same sentence. Captio AI captions both. I follow the whole lecture now."

Elona H. 🇦🇱
elona.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Polytechnic University of Tirana

"No interpreter at our university. I was recording everything and trying to read lips while taking notes. Captio AI fixed that. I just read and participate."

Arber K. 🇲🇰
arber.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, South East European University, Tetovo

"Albanian words ending in ë have almost no lip movement at the end. I was reading up to the last syllable and then guessing the word. Captio AI captures the full word. Tirana lectures make sense now."

Arta M. 🇦🇱
arta.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Tirana

"My professors speak Geg. The nasalized vowels and different rhotics look nothing like the Tosk standard I learned. Captio AI handles both varieties. Prishtina lectures are accessible."

Besnik G. 🇽🇰
besnik.g***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Prishtina, Kosovo

"Technical lectures switch between Albanian and English constantly. Two phonological systems in the same sentence. Captio AI captions both. I follow the whole lecture now."

Elona H. 🇦🇱
elona.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Polytechnic University of Tirana

"No interpreter at our university. I was recording everything and trying to read lips while taking notes. Captio AI fixed that. I just read and participate."

Arber K. 🇲🇰
arber.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, South East European University, Tetovo

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Albanian.

Captio AI is free to start

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