Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Azerbaijani live captions and productivity tool for lectures

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

🏛️Large lecture halls

Large lecture halls at Baku State University, ADA University, and UNEC — Azerbaijani instruction delivered at full academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and tutorials where faculty mix Azerbaijani with Russian or English technical vocabulary. Captio AI handles the code-switching without manual adjustment.

💻Online and recorded lectures

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

📚Study groups

Study groups reviewing Azerbaijani lecture content in Baku student accommodation. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Guest lecturers from Iranian Azerbaijan or diaspora communities whose Azerbaijani carries southern phonological features. Captio AI handles both North and South Azerbaijani varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Online courses and webinars delivered in Azerbaijani from Azerbaijani and Turkish institutions. Captio AI captions any audio source in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Azerbaijani
92.1%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

Azerbaijani

Why Azerbaijani is hard to understand

Uvular stop

  • Azerbaijani /q/ is produced at the back of the throat — no lip movement visible
  • Azerbaijani has a uvular stop /q/ that distinguishes word pairs from the velar /k/. The sound is produced deep in the throat with the back of the tongue — from the front, both sounds look identical on the lips. In a university lecture, this distinction disappears entirely for a deaf student.

Vowel harmony invisibility

  • Nine vowel phonemes with front-back harmony — rounded vowels all look alike at speed
  • Azerbaijani has nine vowel phonemes governed by vowel harmony. The rounded vowels /ø/, /y/, /o/, /u/ all require lip rounding but produce similar lip shapes at lecture speed. A deaf student tracking lip movement cannot reliably distinguish which rounded vowel is intended from the visual signal alone.

North-South phonological split

  • Northern and Southern Azerbaijani have different vowel inventories and mouth positions
  • Northern Azerbaijani (spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan) and Southern Azerbaijani (spoken in northwestern Iran) have markedly different vowel systems — the southern variety preserves vowel distinctions that northern speech has merged. Students or lecturers from an Iranian Azerbaijani background present lip movement patterns that differ from Baku-standard speech.

Russian loanword phonology

  • Academic Azerbaijani is dense with Russian loanwords carrying Slavic consonant clusters
  • Soviet-era Azerbaijani academia absorbed large quantities of Russian vocabulary. These loanwords carry Russian consonant clusters and palatalization patterns that sit phonologically outside native Azerbaijani word structure. At lecture speed, a deaf student must switch between Turkic Azerbaijani lip patterns and Russian cluster patterns mid-sentence.

Vowel reduction at speed

  • Fast academic Azerbaijani drops unstressed short vowels — word shapes collapse
  • Azerbaijani academic speech at normal lecture pace reduces unstressed short vowels toward zero. The vowel harmony cues that allow a deaf person to identify the word class disappear, leaving consonant sequences without the vowel frames that make them trackable on the lips.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss in the South Caucasus — a gap the data barely captures

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.57 billion people globally had some degree of hearing loss in 2019 — roughly one in five of the world's population. In the South Caucasus, including Azerbaijan, systematic national hearing screening programmes are limited and audiological services are concentrated in capital cities. Rural Azerbaijanis with hearing loss may go years without diagnosis, and hearing aid provision is not universally covered by state insurance.

Azerbaijan passed the Law on Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2001 and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, which commits the state to ensuring equal access to education, employment, and public services. In practice, sign language interpreter provision at Azerbaijani universities is not systematically organised, and deaf students seeking access to higher education must individually negotiate accommodation with each institution.

The academic environment is additionally complicated by Azerbaijan's bilingual reality: lectures at major Azerbaijani universities draw students and faculty who are native speakers of Russian, Azerbaijani, or both, and some faculties teach in English. For a deaf or hard of hearing student in Baku, the challenge is not one language but an unpredictable mix of all three in a single lecture. Captio AI captions Azerbaijani lecture speech in real time — in a Baku seminar room or a university video call — so the lecture is accessible on the day it happens.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Azerbaijani lectures drop into Russian vocabulary with no warning. Two phonological systems in the same lecture. Captio AI follows both. I stopped spending half my energy trying to keep up."

Leyla M. 🇦🇿
leyla.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku State University

"The uvular sounds in Azerbaijani are invisible on the lips. I was guessing half the consonants. Captio AI gets them right. My lecture notes actually reflect what was said."

Farid H. 🇦🇿
farid.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, ADA University, Baku

"No interpreter, no captioning at our university. I was the only deaf student in my programme. Captio AI changed that. I follow every lecture the same day as everyone else."

Nigar A. 🇦🇿
nigar.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, UNEC, Baku

"My Azerbaijani is Southern — different vowels from Baku standard. Captio AI handles it. The professor's Baku speech captions correctly even when I am the one from a different variety."

Tural I. 🇦🇿
tural.i***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Tabriz, South Azerbaijan

"Azerbaijani lectures drop into Russian vocabulary with no warning. Two phonological systems in the same lecture. Captio AI follows both. I stopped spending half my energy trying to keep up."

Leyla M. 🇦🇿
leyla.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku State University

"The uvular sounds in Azerbaijani are invisible on the lips. I was guessing half the consonants. Captio AI gets them right. My lecture notes actually reflect what was said."

Farid H. 🇦🇿
farid.h***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, ADA University, Baku

"No interpreter, no captioning at our university. I was the only deaf student in my programme. Captio AI changed that. I follow every lecture the same day as everyone else."

Nigar A. 🇦🇿
nigar.a***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, UNEC, Baku

"My Azerbaijani is Southern — different vowels from Baku standard. Captio AI handles it. The professor's Baku speech captions correctly even when I am the one from a different variety."

Tural I. 🇦🇿
tural.i***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Tabriz, South Azerbaijan

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Azerbaijani.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store