Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Greek 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 amphitheatres at the University of Athens, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Democritus University — Greek-medium instruction at academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and φροντιστήριο (tutorial sessions) where discussion moves between Greek and English. Captio AI handles both without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university e-class 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 Greek student accommodation reviewing lecture content. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Guest lecturers from Thessaloniki or northern Greece whose Greek carries northern vowel reduction patterns. Captio AI handles standard and northern Greek varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Greek
92.6%

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.

Greek

Why Greek is hard to understand

Fricative clusters

  • Greek consonant clusters /ks/, /ps/, /ft/ are produced at the back of the mouth
  • Greek word-initial and word-medial clusters like /ks/ ('ξένος', stranger), /ps/ ('ψυχή', soul), and /ft/ ('φτάνω', arrive) involve velar or bilabial fricatives followed by stops — most of the acoustic event happens in the throat or on closed lips. In a lecture hall, these clusters produce brief or near-invisible lip movements at full pace.

Vowel reduction

  • Unstressed Greek vowels reduce significantly — syllable shapes change at lecture speed
  • Modern Greek reduces unstressed vowels in fast speech. The five-vowel system becomes less distinct in unstressed positions, and in northern Greek dialects unstressed high vowels /i/ and /u/ are sometimes deleted entirely. A deaf student tracking lip positions finds that the unstressed syllables of a Thessaloniki professor look different from what Athenian standard would predict.

Northern vowel deletion

  • Northern Greek deletes unstressed vowels — words arrive shorter than a lip-reader expects
  • Northern Greek dialects, including Thessaloniki and Macedonia, raise and delete unstressed /i/ and /u/ vowels. 'Κυρία' (Mrs.) may arrive as 'Κρία' — the unstressed vowel gone. For a deaf student calibrated to standard Athenian Greek, northern Greek faculty at Greek universities deliver word shapes with missing syllables.

Academic register shift

  • Greek academic writing uses archaic forms read aloud in seminars
  • Modern Greek academia shifted from Katharevousa to Demotic after 1976, but academic texts still contain archaic vocabulary and constructions read aloud in seminars and tutorials. These archaic forms produce word shapes that do not correspond to what a deaf student has learned from everyday colloquial Greek.

Dental fricatives

  • Greek /θ/ and /ð/ reduce toward stop-like articulations in fast academic speech
  • Greek dental fricatives /θ/ ('θάλασσα', sea) and /ð/ ('δρόμος', road) are produced with the tongue at or between the teeth. In careful speech they are partially visible; in fast academic Greek they reduce to near dental contact. A deaf student tracking these phonemes at lecture speed loses the distinction between fricative and stop in the dental position.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Up to 40,000 deaf and hard of hearing Greeks — with no official national count and no captioning at Greek universities

Greece estimates between 25,000 and 40,000 deaf and hard of hearing people among its population — but this figure comes from the Federation of the Deaf of Greece's own count of approximately 3,000 active members, not from a national registry. An official database of deaf and hard of hearing Greeks has never been created. A 2018 study in the Archives of Public Health (PMC6174559), which examined 140 DHH Greek adults, found that hearing loss consistently and significantly reduces health-related quality of life across mental health, social functioning, and general health dimensions — confirming the population carries a substantial quality-of-life burden that is rarely measured at the national level.

Research on health service access barriers in Greece found that 93% of deaf participants struggled to navigate the healthcare system, with difficulties booking appointments, limited administrative accessibility, and insufficient interpretation provision. Greek Sign Language (GSL) received official recognition in 2000, but sign language interpreters at Greek universities are not systematically provided. Students who are deaf or hard of hearing at the University of Athens, Aristotle University, or any Greek regional university must self-arrange any academic support, and live captioning does not exist as a standard university service.

Greece is one of the few EU member states without an official disability prevalence survey — people with hearing disabilities are, in the formal sense, not counted. They are present in lecture halls, navigating spoken Greek instruction in amphitheatres where the acoustics carry the professor's voice to hearing students and nothing reaches anyone who cannot hear. Captio AI captions Greek lecture speech in real time — in a University of Athens amphitheatre or an Aristotle University seminar room — making every session accessible without prior arrangement.

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

"Greek fricative clusters are produced at the back of the mouth — nothing visible on the lips. Captio AI transcribes acoustically. Athens lectures are accessible to me now."

Eleni P. 🇬🇷
eleni.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Athens

"Thessaloniki Greek deletes vowels — words arrive shorter than I expect from the written form. Captio AI handles northern Greek correctly. Lectures are captions I can actually trust."

Nikos D. 🇬🇷
nikos.d***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki

"No captioning service in Greece. No sign language interpreter for my faculty. Captio AI is the only live access I have to my lectures. It works every session."

Stavroula K. 🇬🇷
stavroula.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Democritus University, Thrace

"Academic Greek uses archaic vocabulary read from texts in seminars. The word shapes are unfamiliar from everyday speech. Captio AI gets the transcription right regardless of register."

Giorgos M. 🇬🇷
giorgos.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Patras

"Greek fricative clusters are produced at the back of the mouth — nothing visible on the lips. Captio AI transcribes acoustically. Athens lectures are accessible to me now."

Eleni P. 🇬🇷
eleni.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Athens

"Thessaloniki Greek deletes vowels — words arrive shorter than I expect from the written form. Captio AI handles northern Greek correctly. Lectures are captions I can actually trust."

Nikos D. 🇬🇷
nikos.d***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki

"No captioning service in Greece. No sign language interpreter for my faculty. Captio AI is the only live access I have to my lectures. It works every session."

Stavroula K. 🇬🇷
stavroula.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Democritus University, Thrace

"Academic Greek uses archaic vocabulary read from texts in seminars. The word shapes are unfamiliar from everyday speech. Captio AI gets the transcription right regardless of register."

Giorgos M. 🇬🇷
giorgos.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Patras

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Greek.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store