Czech live captions and productivity tool for lectures

Up to 300,000 people in the Czech Republic have hearing impairment. Czech Sign Language (Český znakový jazyk) was officially recognised by the Czech parliament in 1998 — among the earlier European recognitions — with deaf people formally granted the right to education in their native language. However, the 1998 law did not extend its provisions to universities and courts, leaving Czech deaf students at higher education institutions without a statutory right to academic interpreting. A student at Charles University or Masaryk University who is deaf must individually negotiate accommodation with the disability office, and interpreter availability for specialised academic content is limited.

Genetic research on hearing loss in Moravia-Silesia confirms the condition's presence across Czech populations, with GJB2 gene variants accounting for a significant share of hereditary hearing loss cases. The Czech Deaf Association and the Czech Union of the Deaf (CUN) advocate for expanded services, but the university sector has been slow to adopt systematic captioning. Many deaf Czech students report that their first experience of comprehensive lecture access is through assistive technology rather than institutional provision.

The gap is felt most acutely in seminars and tutorials — the smaller, faster, discussion-based academic settings where Czech academic life is built and where no formal captioning exists at any Czech university. A deaf student at a Brno cvičení or a Prague seminar follows spoken Czech that moves faster than careful lip-reading allows. Captio AI captions Czech lecture and seminar speech in real time — in Prague or Brno, in a large amphitheatre or a small seminar room — so every academic setting is accessible without advance arrangement.