Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Croatian 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 Zagreb, University of Split, and the University of Rijeka — Croatian instruction at full academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and vježbe (tutorial sessions) where discussion is in Croatian, often with English scientific terminology. Captio AI handles both without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university portals (Merlin, e-learning systems) or shared as video files — play on speaker and Captio AI captions whatever is playing in real time.

📚Study groups

Study groups reviewing Croatian lecture material in student dormitories. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Guest lecturers from coastal Croatia (Split, Rijeka, Dubrovnik) whose Croatian carries Čakavian features. Captio AI handles Štokavian standard and regional Croatian varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Croatian
90.5%

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.

Croatian

Why Croatian is hard to understand

Pitch accent system

  • Croatian has four phonemic tonal accents — all invisible on the lips
  • Croatian uses four pitch accents to distinguish word meaning: short rising, short falling, long rising, and long falling. In a Zagreb university lecture, words that are identical in consonants and vowels carry different meaning based solely on tonal melody. This distinction is entirely absent from the visual signal — a deaf student sees identical lip movements for words that differ only in pitch.

Three dialect groups

  • Štokavian, Čakavian, and Kajkavian produce very different lip patterns for the same concepts
  • Croatian has three major dialect groups: Štokavian (standard, most speakers), Čakavian (coastal, Dalmatia, Istria), and Kajkavian (Zagreb area, northern Croatia). These dialects differ in vocabulary, prosody, and some phonological processes. A deaf student calibrated to Zagreb Kajkavian finds Split Čakavian faculty presenting substantially different lip patterns for the same academic content.

Vowel length invisibility

  • Croatian long and short vowels change meaning — the distinction is invisible
  • Standard Croatian distinguishes short and long vowels phonemically. The length difference is acoustic — the same lip shape for both variants. In a Croatian university lecture, vowel length carries meaning in vocabulary throughout the session but leaves no visual trace.

Ijekavian yat reflex

  • Croatian Ijekavian pronunciation delivers longer word shapes than other South Slavic varieties
  • Standard Croatian is Ijekavian — the historical yat vowel is rendered as 'ije' or 'je' depending on quantity (long or short). This means Croatian words are systematically longer than their Serbian Ekavian counterparts. In a fast Croatian lecture, the Ijekavian sequences compress, and a deaf student calibrated to Ekavian patterns finds Croatian word shapes consistently different.

Formal register speed

  • Croatian academic formal register uses archaic morphological forms at full lecture pace
  • Croatian academic formal speech preserves certain morphological forms — the instrumental case, longer verbal forms — that are compressed in casual speech. At lecture speed, the formal register creates long morphological words delivered rapidly, with suffix boundaries compressing into the preceding root.

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The Challenge

13,230 hearing-impaired Croatians — with 20 sign language interpreters for the whole country

The 2011 Croatian census recorded 13,230 persons with impaired hearing, of whom 2,763 had total or major hearing disability. A 2023 study published in PMC using the Croatian version of the Hearing Handicap Inventory (HHIE-S-CRO) confirmed the need for systematic audiological rehabilitation candidacy screening in Croatia. The Croatian Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing — established in 1921 and one of the oldest disability organisations in the region — has approximately 9,000 members across 23 organisations and is affiliated with the World Federation of the Deaf.

Croatia passed the Law on Croatian Sign Language and Other Communication Systems in 2015 — a significant milestone that formally recognised Croatian Sign Language. However, at the time the law was passed, there were approximately 20 sign language interpreters in Croatia, three of whom were based in Zagreb. Deaf education in Croatia historically used a predominantly oral/auditory-speech approach, and the shift to sign-language-inclusive education is relatively recent. University-level educational interpreting is now available but dependent on those 20 interpreters serving an entire country.

For a deaf student at the University of Zagreb, Split, or Rijeka, the practical reality is that sign language interpretation for specialised academic lectures is available only with significant advance arrangement and only within Zagreb's limited interpreter pool. Captio AI captions Croatian lecture speech in real time — in a Zagreb vježbe or a Split seminar — handling all three Croatian dialect groups in the same session, without advance arrangement.

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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

"Croatian pitch accents are invisible on the lips — four tonal patterns for words that look the same. Captio AI gets them all right. Zagreb lectures are accessible now."

Ana P. 🇭🇷
ana.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Zagreb

"My professor is from Split — Čakavian dialect. The word shapes are different from Zagreb Kajkavian. Captio AI handles both. I follow Split lectures the same way I follow Zagreb ones."

Tomislav B. 🇭🇷
tomislav.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Split

"Three interpreters in Zagreb for the whole country. I'm in Rijeka. Captio AI is the access I actually have. It works every lecture, every day."

Ivana R. 🇭🇷
ivana.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Rijeka

"Formal Croatian academic register uses long Ijekavian forms at full pace. Captio AI captions the formal register correctly. Osijek seminars are accessible."

Marko K. 🇭🇷
marko.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek

"Croatian pitch accents are invisible on the lips — four tonal patterns for words that look the same. Captio AI gets them all right. Zagreb lectures are accessible now."

Ana P. 🇭🇷
ana.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Zagreb

"My professor is from Split — Čakavian dialect. The word shapes are different from Zagreb Kajkavian. Captio AI handles both. I follow Split lectures the same way I follow Zagreb ones."

Tomislav B. 🇭🇷
tomislav.b***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Split

"Three interpreters in Zagreb for the whole country. I'm in Rijeka. Captio AI is the access I actually have. It works every lecture, every day."

Ivana R. 🇭🇷
ivana.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Rijeka

"Formal Croatian academic register uses long Ijekavian forms at full pace. Captio AI captions the formal register correctly. Osijek seminars are accessible."

Marko K. 🇭🇷
marko.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Croatian.

Captio AI is free to start

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