Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Lithuanian 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 theatres at Vilnius University and KTU in Kaunas — where foundational-year courses are delivered in Lithuanian by lecturers from across the country, each with regional accent variations reflecting their hometown dialect.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and tutorials where graduate students and professors debate in Lithuanian — with the speed and overlapping turns of academic discussion presenting a very different lip-reading challenge than a structured monologue.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Online and recorded lectures on Lithuanian e-learning platforms — digital content delivered asynchronously where pitch-accented word pairs are impossible to distinguish without captions.

📚Study groups

Study group sessions in student accommodation in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Klaipėda — peer discussion in colloquial Lithuanian, where the formal register of lectures gives way to faster, more contracted everyday speech.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

International courses taught in Lithuanian for Erasmus students — with non-native Lithuanian speakers delivering presentations in the language, producing non-standard pitch patterns and altered consonant palatalization.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Guest speakers and public academics at Lithuanian universities — researchers delivering talks on specialist topics in Lithuanian, often at a rapid pace driven by prepared text rather than adaptive communication.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Lithuanian
90.6%

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.

Lithuanian

Why Lithuanian is hard to understand

Pitch accent

  • Lithuanian pitch accent distinguishes word meaning but is invisible on the lips
  • Lithuanian has a full lexical pitch accent system — one of the few surviving Indo-European pitch accent languages — where the same lip shape with a rising vs. falling tone maps to different words. In a Vilnius University lecture hall, a deaf student sees identical lip shapes for words with opposite or unrelated meanings. The tonal contrast lives entirely in the acoustic signal, not in any visible articulatory feature.

Palatalization pairs

  • 22 pairs of palatalized vs. non-palatalized consonants differ only by tongue position
  • Lithuanian has 45 consonants, including 22 pairs where the only distinction is whether the tongue is raised toward the palate. The difference between palatalized /tʲ/ and plain /t/ involves a subtle tongue-shape adjustment with no difference in lip closure, jaw position, or visible mouth shape. In a university seminar, a deaf student cannot distinguish these pairs from visual observation alone.

Diphthong compression

  • Lithuanian's long diphthong system reduces at conversational lecture pace
  • Lithuanian vowels include phonemically long vowels and complex diphthongs (ai, ei, ui, au, ou, ie, uo) that distinguish word meanings. At academic speed, diphthong transitions compress — the visual glide from one vowel position to another shortens below the threshold where lip-reading reliably detects the distinction, collapsing multiple phonemic contrasts into one visible position.

Unpredictable stress

  • Lithuanian word stress is lexically unpredictable — no visual boundary signal for lip-readers
  • Lithuanian word stress is unpredictable: unlike Polish or Finnish where stress falls on a fixed syllable, Lithuanian stressed syllables can occur anywhere in the word. In fast academic speech, a deaf student watching lip shapes has no structural rule to predict where the syllable nucleus will be most prominent, making word segmentation at lecture pace significantly harder than in fixed-stress languages.

Formal register gap

  • Academic Lithuanian uses archaic morphology that diverges sharply from everyday speech
  • Written and academic Lithuanian preserves case endings and verbal forms that are substantially reduced or absent in colloquial Vilnius speech. A deaf student trained on everyday lip-reading encounters a formally different language in the lecture hall — full inflectional endings that make words longer and change their visual profile, combined with specialist vocabulary not encountered in casual settings.

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The Challenge

14,500 deaf Lithuanians — and one of Europe's highest known rates of genetic hearing loss

An estimated 14,500 deaf people live in Lithuania, primarily using Lithuanian Sign Language. Research published in PMC identified a notably high frequency of the GJB2 gene mutation c.313_326del14 in the Lithuanian population — a carrier rate of approximately 7.1% (roughly one in fourteen Lithuanians) — suggesting that hereditary hearing loss has a particular and historically rooted prevalence here. GJB2-related hearing loss typically manifests as moderate-to-profound congenital sensorineural hearing loss, placing Lithuanian deaf children at a developmental disadvantage from birth.

More than thirty years after restoring independence, Lithuania still lacks a comprehensive national system for identifying, supporting, and educating its deafblind citizens — a gap reported directly by Lithuanian public media. The country has no national organisation representing deafblind people, no tactile version of Lithuanian, and no reliable estimate of how many deafblind people actually live there. This absence at the most extreme end of the hearing loss spectrum reflects a broader pattern in which deaf and hard of hearing Lithuanians must navigate education and employment largely through individual initiative rather than systematic provision.

Lithuanian Sign Language is not constitutionally or legislatively recognised at the same level as spoken Lithuanian. For a deaf student at Vilnius University or Kaunas University of Technology facing a lecture delivered in pitch-accented academic Lithuanian at speed, Captio AI provides real-time captions that resolve the tonal distinctions and palatalization contrasts entirely invisible from lip position.

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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

"Lithuanian pitch accent is completely invisible. Rising and falling tones tell you which word you heard — you cannot see them. Captio AI resolves it acoustically. VU lectures are accessible now."

Aistė K. 🇱🇹
aiste.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Vilnius University

"Engineering terminology in Lithuanian has long inflected forms I hadn't lip-read before. Captio AI gives me the full form on screen. KTU lectures in Lithuanian are the first I've ever fully followed."

Mantas B. 🇱🇹
mantas.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, KTU, Kaunas

"Palatalized consonants in Lithuanian are silent from the outside. Half the consonant distinctions are invisible. Captio AI catches all of them. Law lectures are finally trackable."

Rasa P. 🇱🇹
rasa.p***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Vilnius, law faculty

"Academic Lithuanian is almost a different language from what I lip-read at home. Captio AI bridges that gap. Klaipėda lectures in formal Lithuanian are clear to me now."

Tomas J. 🇱🇹
tomas.j***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Klaipėda University

"Lithuanian pitch accent is completely invisible. Rising and falling tones tell you which word you heard — you cannot see them. Captio AI resolves it acoustically. VU lectures are accessible now."

Aistė K. 🇱🇹
aiste.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Vilnius University

"Engineering terminology in Lithuanian has long inflected forms I hadn't lip-read before. Captio AI gives me the full form on screen. KTU lectures in Lithuanian are the first I've ever fully followed."

Mantas B. 🇱🇹
mantas.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, KTU, Kaunas

"Palatalized consonants in Lithuanian are silent from the outside. Half the consonant distinctions are invisible. Captio AI catches all of them. Law lectures are finally trackable."

Rasa P. 🇱🇹
rasa.p***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Vilnius, law faculty

"Academic Lithuanian is almost a different language from what I lip-read at home. Captio AI bridges that gap. Klaipėda lectures in formal Lithuanian are clear to me now."

Tomas J. 🇱🇹
tomas.j***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Klaipėda University

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Lithuanian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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